Tapa Update #11 - Release Week

It's finally here! Release week has arrived! New video incoming on Saturday. (24 hours earlier for early access members, waddup!)

Behind the Scenes
Audio Panning

It's an exciting week, so let's discuss a dry-ass topic. Or maybe not all that dry, actually, but at least very ... niche. Some extra attentive peeps out there have already noticed a little trick I use for the audio mix in videos. If you did, that's 100 points for you. I'm talking about audio panning.
Since I've started adding skits to my videos, I've been struggling with the problem of how to make clear when the audio you hear is me narrating the video and when it's a character talking. Since I do all of them myself, it's sometimes pretty hard to distinguish one from the other; especially since I'm not all that great with doing accents and different voices. One thing that helps, is that the effects put on my narrator voice and my skit character voices are slightly different.
This other trick I've come up with helps a lot with that, too. I use audio panning - i.e. audio that's either more to the left or the right, i.e. the left output gets louder than the right one or vice-versa - to give a spatial impression of where the people speaking are situated. If a person stands slightly to the left, their audio has a bit of bias to the left as well. My narrator audio, on the other hand, stays in the center all the time, so you intuitively know, when a voice is off-center, it's not me but a character speaking. That's just one of those little things I do that make a real difference in how a video is perceived, even if it's pretty rare someone actively picks up on it.

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Qomments and Cuestions
Flag of Ukraine
"What do you mean by it was also used like yellow blue and not only blue yellow? Never in my life i seen in Ukraine that they use yellow blue."

Okay, so, two things:

1. The Ukrainian flag has existed for more than a century. Nowadays, it's clearly established that blue is on top, but that's not always been the case. Many a document and quote from the time of the flag's inception uses "yellow-blue" when describing it. The first color spoken is traditionally the one on top, though that's in no way binding. There also exist a some pictures of the time showing Ukrainian flags with yellow on top. Which brings me to ...

2. Yellow-blue is often "proven" by pointing at black-and-white photos where a lighter color is on top and a darker color on the bottom. That would usually indicate yellow to be on top, except, due to the way different colors reacted with the specific photographic film chemicals used back then, that lighter color in photographs was actually blue.

However, there are other documents of the time - paintings or printed goods - showing that yellow actually was on top at least some of the time. It's only the way that some tried to prove it that wasn't quite right.

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Interesting Stuff
Memento

I've seen quite a few films in my day, but this one might just be the best. The perfect synthesis of plot and its cinematic expression. Many films have some gimmick to make them stand out. Memento has one of those too, only, this one's not gimmicky in the slightest. The whole thing is made very specifically to reflect the things going on within its story. I'm not gonna say too much about it here, but I highly recommend you give it a watch and tell me what you think.

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If you ever sit in the cinema, thinking of taking a quick peek or two at your phone, just to check the time or see if there are any new notifications or whatever, for the love of all that is holy and good and beautiful in this world ... DON'T. 🙂

Have a good one!
Tapa