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Hey guys! After working for a month and a half, I'm releasing my second Toki Pona Song: "A Sock Went Missing feat. Raine Rena" (len noka wan li kama weka)! It's been 7 years since my last release.
It's a piece of music with very silly lyrics and accompanied animation. It's also my first time using other people's character in my work. Hope that you'd enjoy with watching how the main character suffers! :D
Usage terms: Except for the soyjak meme, the washing machine brand logo and the broken glass sfx in the music, I made all of the content below on my own. However, I stole used the vocal and character design of Raine Rena from suyu. For the usage terms of the vocal and the character's drawing, please refer to the website/social media of suyu. For usage terms of the content that I didn't create, use your own discretion. Otherwise, you can pretty much use the content below that I created for whatever you want. Giving me credit is optional. Please notice that I assume no liability on your usage of the content below.
My workflow on this musical animation project is as below:
My own voice is terrible. That's why I'm gonna use a vocal synth this time over. I've found the synth software OpenUtau. However, it's surprisingly difficult for me to look for a voicebank that can sing in Toki Pona. I thought that Toki Pona was so simple that any voicebank would do. I was wrong! Those Japanese voicebanks generally can't do the Toki Pona syllables like "wi", "we", "si", "la", "le", "li", "lo", "lu" (and no, the Japanese "r" somtimes sounds nothing like "l"). As for English voicebanks, some of them expect me to enter actual English words. It's difficult to get it to pronoun certain syllables. Quite a few voice banks also has inconsistent voice between different syllables.
For Toki Pona language, out of like 10 voicebanks I've tested, the only good enough one was Raine Rena. In fact, I was reluctant to try this one out at first because its website was hosted on Weebly, which doesn't look professional. I only tried it out of desperation and I was surprised by its quality. I was further surprised to find that this voicebank was made by a small creator. And it was even better than the more popular ones like Teto and Ruko. Perhaps it's caused by misconfiguration or mishandling on my side. Either way Rena's the one I'm gonna use for this project.
Due to the questionable theme of my song and that I'm gonna abuse Rena to sing in an unintended language, I've asked for permission from the author for using it. I'm glad that the author's cool with that. :D
This time over, I'm using Ardour instead of LMMS as an experiment. The workflow is a bit different from LMMS. I found LMMS a bit easier to use because it has everything integrated, including the synth and plugins. But with Ardour, I get to use all those third party synth that aren't easy to be used on LMMS. So it's a trade-off.
I've also stopped using Palette MCT (software for coming up with melody and chord progression). I just came up with the melody by bashing random notes on my newly purchased SMK-37 PRO. As for the chord progression, I just kept testing each of the chords until it sounded right.
I'm using Inkscape for making art assets. Since I'm using Rena as the vocal, I figured out I might as well want to try drawing the character. At first I was worried about my drawing skill because I was never good at it. And the fact that I've never drawn an anime character isn't helping. I followed some guides online for drawing Chibi characters, except that I'm drawing with a vector graphic software instead of traditional drawing software, which means that I'm drawing by defining curved polygons instead of drawing by making painting brush strokes. Then I draw again while making reference to Rena by eyeballing. To my surprise, despite my almost non-existent drawing skill, I managed to draw a good enough Rena. Perhaps I've received blessing from goddess for being a virgin. :D
Drawing the character was the most difficult part to me. All other art assets were a piece of cake because I've drawn something similar back when I made games. All I had to do was to perform image search for "{item} clipart" or "{item} anime" for inspiration. Then I just need to find a few good ones, eyeball them and draw something similar on Inkscape. Here's the result:
It's my first time using Friction 2D for animation. Last time I made the animation with Synfig and it was a bit limiting. I highly recommend Friction 2D. The UI is intuitive. It supports manipulating any animatable value with Javascript expression. It also supports path effects, raster effects, etc. Using Friction 2D gave me a substantial boost in the animation quality because it offers more powerful feature than Synfig.
I'm using its development release and it's a bit buggy, especially for the rendering of the animation. But it still works well enough for this project.
Nothing interesting here. I just stitch all the rendered animation pieces and the music with Kdenlive.
Finally I made the English subtitles with Aegisub so that barbarian like you can understand the content of the vid. And I baked the subtitles into the vid with ffmpeg.
This project wouldn't be possible without the following awesome persons:
Thank you very much! :3
I'm exhausted. I guess I'm gonna take a short break. I'll probably install Genshin Impact on a spare computer I've got and start playing it again because the installation on my main linux computer was broken, and the graphic quality of mobile version I've tried was absolutely terrible. Maybe I'd also try finishing the Factorio Space Age savefile that I was about to complete a year ago. Oh. I guess I'm also gonna watch Kowloon Generic Romance because my friend amigojapan recommended that.
After that, my next project would be making a hardware Wakalito keyboard that can be mass-manufactured.
As for my next musical project, it's gonna take me at least a year until I make a new one. I'm running out of funny ideas because they're hard to come by.
As for my Toy Motor Controller project a.k.a. edging machine, which you'd have long known the true nature of this project if you know me personally, I'm putting it aside. I've spent years on it and I still haven't found a working algorithm/setup for that. It's a blocker to Sadale's prosperity. I'm not gonna further fall into this sunk cost fallacy. At least not until I complete a few more projects that I'm confident in finishing.
Have fun watching! Have fun remixing! :)
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