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Hey guys! Today I'm releasing a toki pona song "Futile Attempt of Killing Mosquito" along with an animation. I've spent 8 days and nights on this piece of music and its animation! It's also my first serious animation project in my life!
This music came from Global Game Jam 2018. I decided to be a musical guy for the event. So I've made quite a few pieces of music as a practice. That's because we're required to get the work done within 48 hours in the event. So I have to get familiar with the tools. A few months after the event, I found that I love one of those musical segment particularly. Then I elaborate this part and enhance it and I've made an animation for it. And here we have this musical animation.
Unlike my previous music, this time I'm providing source files of music publicly and direct download link to a few variants of its animation. That makes remixing and editing the music and animation much easier compared with my previous works!
Check out this musical animation on Youtube!
If you distribute a remix of any resources from this project, feel free to inform me. If it's a good one I'd be happy to put up a link to your work right in this blogpost!
License of the resources above: CC BY 4.0. Please attribute to this blog post or sadale.net. If you do not want to do the attribution, please contact me and let me know what you're going to use these resource for. It's very likely that I'll grant you attribution exemption.
If you want to do vocal swap, first, download the resource "Music" or "Vocal Assist". While playing any of these, sing along and record what you're singing. Then download "Instrumental Music" and align your recording to the Instrumental Music track with software like Audacity. Then you've got your voice into this piece of music.
With vocal swap, you can even sing this song in another language!
If you want to modify the subtitles of the vid, download the resource "Animation without English Subtitles" and "SubStation Alpha English subtitles". Modify the resource "SubStation Alpha English subtitles" with software like Aegisub. With FFMPEG, you can combine the subtitles and the video. Then you get a video with subtitles in another language.
If you provide that subtitles file to the video hosted on Youtube above, other users can view your subtitles.
There're two ways to do remix. The first way is to use LMMS to remix the music. Download the resource "LMMS Music Project Source File". Follow the instruction in the file and download "Vocal (for LMMS)". Then you can modify the music right inside LMMS.
Another way is to use other audio tools. After downloading the resources "Music", "Instrumental Music" and "Vocal", you can do operation on the audio to remix it. For example, one can add some drum and stuffs to it, or add some effects to it like adding filters or reverb effect or pitch change or something like that. Just do whatever you want with them!
It's Toki Pona. It's a minimalist, constructed language invented by jan Sonja. The entire language is made of 123 words! It's rather easy to get fluent on it. I learned this language like two or three months ago. It took me like a month to learn it.
Long time ago I've attempted learning another constructed language Esperanto. I didn't have much success. Mainly because it really takes a bit of time to learn those vocabularies. I had to look up the dictionary from time to time. But Toki Pona's different. Once I learn all those 123 words, it isn't that difficult to understand any Toki Pona text and conversations. Even if I don't completely understand it, at least I'd have an idea on what it's about because I understand every single word. It's just that I don't understand the combination of words.
If you've nothing to do and interested in learning a useless language, Toki Pona is the language to go! Toki Pona community does exist. It's a bit small, tho. Still, it's rather fun to chat in a language that others couldn't understand. That's how do you talk shit about others without drawing any unwanted attention! :P
A image's worth thousands of words. Take a look on this pic for an overview of how this vid were made:
I'll not go thru all of the software above. I'll just cover the interesting parts.
I made the melody and chord with Palette MCT. It's a great free tool for doing chord progression and designing melody. Since I lack knowledge on music theory about chord and stuffs, this tool is very helpful to me. Previously I did chord progression by trial and error. I adjusts each note tediously until I find the one that sounds right. With this software, it helps me to filter out those inappropriate chord immediately. Then I can focus on the one that sounds good.
Unfortunately, it doesn't support linux. I had to run it on wine. And it's the only non-FOSS tool I've used for this project.
As you see, there're those musical notes. The pink notes are non-chord notes. The black ones are the chord ones. And the colored rectangles with letters and numbers are the chord chosen for the measure.
This part was done before Global Game Jam 2018. Once again, this music is a enhancement of a piece of music made during my practice for the jam. :P
I made the graphic with Inkscape. Then it's imported to Synfig and turned into animation. I learned its basic within a day using this video course: [How to create animation in Synfig (3rd edition)]. Synfig itself is free. But the video course isn't. Still, it's very affordable. If you're interested in learning it and cannot afford it, I'd be happy to buy a copy for you.
Synfig is a great piece of FOSS animation tool. It's easy to use. But it's rather time consuming to make animation with it. After making the animation, it also takes quite a bit of time to render, especially for video that uses the "Curve Warp Layer". It takes an hour and half to render an animation with like 500 frames on my Bay Trail Pentium laptop. The Curve Warp Layer was used to make the swinging arm animation in our video.
The completion of this video marks the end of the break of my Portable Game Console Project. I'll get back to that project soon.
I enjoyed making this animation. The catch is that it takes far too much time to make one. I'll make another one in the future if I have the time.
Copyright (C) 2025 Wong "Sadale" Cho Ching, all rights reserved.