Putting it all together

The final stages involved a general clean-up and then putting the animation together.

After giving the videos a basic render, they were watched over and over for inaccuracies and problems. Interestingly, there were several, none of which are immediately obvious the first time you watch it. This is, of course, down the fact that your attention is more fixed on the key character movements. It's only when you've seen it a few times that you spot things like Kris' tie passing through a wooden table. So I went back over the animation and re-rendered them with the updated changes.

With the final batch of 4 videos... the only thing left was to stick them together with the appropriate fades between scenes

Enter Adobe Premiere!

Other then a fade-to/from-black at either end, and a fade from one scene to the other - Nothing fancy was added to the visual side of the animation. The main priority was getting everything together.

After I had a final version of the finished video now under my belt (And backed up on several sources!), it was time to start considering potential sounds or music.

Though I intially considered mumblings and sound effects - The problem was the lack of actual dialogue between the characters. The sounds wouldn't actually add much other than some weird grumbles... which seemed weak and wouldn't help to 'enhance' the overall effect.

Taking the video to others, a brilliant idea was suggested: Jazz Music! It's light enough to be gentle for the scene, yet upbeat and 'playful' enough to be jolly (As opposed to being calming and sleep-inducing). I was pointed to Bix Beiderbecke as a starting point. Luckily, the first song I came upon did it for me. His piece: 'Singin the Blues' was played alongside the chess animation, and it worked perfectly! It was upbeat yet gentle, and matched the mood. Doing this would also rendered the mutters and grumbles unneccessary, as it worked well purely on its own.

I knew I wanted the music to cut out as Carl smacked the board though, as it was just the sort of "off-beat" action to warrant that the music cuts out instantly. It was time to adorn some of the key movements with sound effects!

Luckily for me, I was finally in possession of a microphone, so was able to spend as long as I needed sitting at my desk making sounds until I felt that they were perfect. The first port of call was the sound of the pieces flying off the table. Though I did not have a full-sized chess board on me, I did have a pack of dice. Though not necessarily the same sound, it was a sufficient replacement. So for the next 20 minutes I started smacking the box of dice across the desk until I had a sound that resembled what chess pieces flying off a board would be like. The length of the sounds were key. I needed the initial cacophany of the pieces all cascading, then needed a few to still keep rolling for a few seconds longer. After a lot of trial and error (and crawling over the floor to retrieve dice that rolled under the bed), I had a good sound.

Last thing left was to take care of the start. 'Singin The Blues' worked well for the chess match, but felt very out of place on the initial chaos and action. As I pondered what to do with the opening scene, I recorded the main sound effects for the actions (The sounds of a clicking finger, hi-5 and making an exaggerated sound for the 'Rock'), and located a nice slamming sound from last year to accompany the slams of the arms in the opening rock-paper-scissors match. They matched the movements nicely... but felt very bare without music.

It was fortunate then, that I have an unusual bunch of friends. Several months ago, one of them forwarded me a link to a really weird Flash video called "Dad's Home" (It's brilliant: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/195918). Luckily for me, the opening music is a piece of upbeat and almost insane Jazz. After watching it, the music got stuck in my head. And it was lucky that it re-appeared as I was doing this, as it fit the opening scene brilliantly.

So I went back and located a portion of Cab Calloway's "Reefer Man", and tried it out. I started it playing as soon as the camera zoomed out, to create an 'anti-climactic' moment... and to be really honest, it worked so well. It was such a brilliant tension breaker.

Working the final tweaks to the volumes - The finished product was exported, and I was done!