Day 60 — Lining up Audio and Visual to Build a Cutscene
Hey and welcome!
This is going to be the last look into building cutscenes for the time being before we move onto making a game out of our project here. I’ve been working on an intro cutscene for the game here that’s roughly a minute long and is pulling out all the stops using the camera and timeline techniques that we’ve learned so far.
The hot new thing with this one though is that I’m going to be adding some audio to the cutscene which is a good time to go over with you how to go about doing that. Adding in the audio is the easy part though, the tricky bit is getting the audio to synch up nicely with the scene I’ve built.
As you may notice above, the camera shots run longer than the animation and more importantly the two audio tracks. The music track isn’t too big of a deal but the voice over one is the tricky one as I’ll need to line up the shots based on certain parts of the dialog.
Before we get to that though I’ll tell you how you can go about adding in this audio for yourself. First up create two empty game objects in your hierarchy, one called Voice Over and another called Background Music or similar. Then attach an audio source component with nothing in it, we’ll be using the timeline to add in and play the audio clip instead.
With that done it’s time to head over to the timeline. Click on the add menu and this time select the audio track option and add in two empty audio tracks into the timeline. Next drag and drop the Voice Over and Background Music objects that you created earlier and rename the tracks to something similar.
In the Game folder you’ll find an Audio folder in there with a separate Music and Voice Over folder inside it. In the music folder you’ll find a Intro_Cutscene_Music audio clip that you can drag and drop into your Background Music track. Likewise in the VO folder you’ll find a Intro_CutScene_Dialogue audio clip to drag and drop into the Voice Over audio track.
If you run the game you’ll now hear some voice acting as well as some suitable background music. You’ll also notice that there are several other audio clips that are used for the other cutscenes we have. After you’ve read the article I recommend trying out adding these to the relevant cutscenes and getting the audio to line up with the visual already there.
Speaking of, I’ll wrap things up with this article but mentioning the best way to go about doing that.
Sadly there’s not really a good automated way to go about doing this since you need to confirm yourself when particular bits of audio are lining up with the shot you want. To get started with that though go ahead and press the play button and keep an eye on your timeline and the in-game shot. If you come across a shot that cuts to early or late you can pause the game using the option next to the play one at the top.
With the timeline open at the same time you’ll have a mark in it for whereabouts you want to make a change, then it’s simply a case of extending or reducing the shot where relevant.
Once you’ve done your adjustment you can then unpause the game to resume the cutscene along with the audio. Lastly you can also move about the white timeline marker while the game is running in order to skip ahead or double back in your cutscene which makes it a bit easier for lining up the audio.
With that knowledge you should be able to try this out for yourself on the other cutscenes or even with this one if you add in your own camera shots. Best thing about this is that without an eye for cinematography even I was able to put together a pretty good looking and sounding cutscene with a little bit of a reference for the shots.
