SoundTrack Construction

An important part of any successful skit is the audio. I tried to pay special attention to making a cool Soundtrack since my acting ability on stage is probably pretty lame. As with anything, good old fashioned research is the first step to deciding what your skit should be about.

In our case, we knew Ellissa was going to be Sailor Iron Mouse. Her role being entirely in Japanese was kind of a catch 22. No one would know what she was saying, so she had to be as animated as possible and do typical Iron Mouse things during the show. So step 1 was watch all those episodes with Iron Mouse over and over again. On a side note, it is funny how cookie-cutter style Sailor Moon was written. While scrubbing through the video, you can predict the exact second the bad guy will appear based on the time counter. That made it easier to collect sound clips as well.

We also knew Weiling was going to be Sakuya since she looks just like her and we just happened to be watching that series. I, by process of elimination, chose to be Tenchi. Step 2 - watch all those episodes where Tenchi and Sakuya were together and start writing down their dialog. Probably the hardest and most time consuming aspect of putting together a Soundtrack from existing shows is finding clean clips where the noise level is minimal and there is limited music in the background that can take away from the spoken words.

Iron Mouse is charged with collecting Star Seeds for Galaxia. With her 2 golden bracelets, Iron Mouse extracts her victim's Star Seed and inspects it for purity. The next issue was who is going to have their Star Seed stolen - Sakuya or Tenchi? Knowing that most Tenchi fans don't really like Sakuya, it would have been a let down for Tenchi to save her, so what could we do? Since Tenchi is the center of every human and alien girl's dream, it was a perfect story. Iron Mouse would confront Tenchi after Sakuya asks him to go steady and gets rejected. But how do we save Tenchi at the end? We don't have a disposable Eternal Sailor Moon with her Star Seed reviving Moon rod or anything.

Sailor Tenchi Captor soundtrack
Right-Click, SaveTarget As
Download the MP3 - 808Kb

Then it came to me in a vision...

After watching the first episode of Card Captor Sakura where she uses the Magic Wand to return the Fly card to its original self, I decided we needed to have Sakuya become Sakura and make Tenchi return to his normal self. So the plot was written, and the real work began.

Now I had to tie the 3 unrelated storylines together using existing footage and have it make sense ( like any Anime storyline ever makes sense ^_^ ). Back to the computer, watching fan subs in RealVideo and Windows Media Player for the next 48 hours straight.

The next technical challenge came when I tried to determine how I would combine all these clips if I couldn't digitally record them. None of the commercial or shareware applications on the market could convert from RealVideo to AIF. I tried them all. No dice. Even the ones that claimed they could didn't work with the files I had. The answer was in the patch cord. On the PowerBook, you can record the outgoing audio via the audio in at the same time!!! This turned out to be a huge time saver since I didn't want to transfer all that to tape and then reimport it. So I cued up the RealVideo 10 seconds before the audio plays, switched to the audio recording app, which in this case was SoundEdit 16, hit record, guessed when it is over based on the time counter, press stop, unplugged the patch cord, replugged the headphones and listened to what I just recorded. Since there is only 1 output and I didn't have a splitter, I couldn't hear during recording. I did that for every audio clip 2-3 times over just to get the levels right!! All in all, that process took nearly 12 hours total and over 1GB of hard drive space - which was wearing thin since I had all those video files on there to begin with.

Okay, so now I have all those audio files. Now what? Well, I storyboarded most scenes based on what audio clips I had. What would happen to Tenchi after his Star Seed was extracted? Normally that individual would become a Phage ( zombie character with Sailor Scout powers ). In our skit he becomes Sailor Senshi TENCHI. The next trick was getting an audio clip of that. Obviously there is no Sailor Moon episode with that character. So I improvised and recorded my own voice. When you listen to the final high-quality Soundtrack, you can totally tell the difference in sound quality. I figured no one would notice during the live skit.

Another issue with using existing content for audio mixing is the quality of the original. Depending on how the video was encoded ( DivX, MPG, AVI, MOV, RealVideo, VCR, DVD ) that has a huge impact on the final quality. Unfortunately, the fan subs of Card Captor I had were poorly done with a low bitrate audio track. I tried to filter out some of the higher frequencies which tend to vibrate your teeth at higher decibels. It worked for the live show I guess. After watching the video of our skit, people were laughing during those *questionable* moments of audio quality anyway - so that worked out. So the storyline gradually came together. I put the multi-track audio file together in 3 stages. For the parts I had nailed ( The Iron Mouse Intro, Tenchi's Star Seed, and the end ), I just needed to merge them into one cohesive clip. That took another 8 hours of fiddling. Seven different Sailor Moon episodes were used to create Iron Mouse's parts - that includes remixing the music you hear during the intro. 3 Tenchi in Tokyo episodes were used to create their dialog and 2 Card Captor Sakura episodes filled in the rest!

Timing was critical too. In the storyboard, the location of each actor was guesstimated and a rough estimate of how long it would take one to get to the other end of the stage. All this and it had to be only 2 minutes long. I cut out a lot of good audio that would have added to the story to keep in as close to 2 minutes as possible. As it was, it ran long by 15 seconds.

So there you have it. Start to finish was 2 weeks worth of watching and editing. It came right down to the wire - me burning the CD-R just 10 minutes before we hit the road for the show. During the hour-long car ride, we listened to that audio over and over and over and over and over. You know how you get when you think you can speak Japanese just because you watch a lot of Anime? Well, that's where we were. Anyway, I hope this has been enlightening as it has been entertaining.

~Prof.Tomoe OO