Below is the second project I created for my first semester of Japanese. I know I didn't need to upload both of my projects, but I put so much effort into this one that I felt it warranted an upload. Simply sitting on my computer gathering dust forevermore didn't seem like a very fitting fate.
It's a two-minute-long animation that I created in Flash over the span of about four days. All the visual elements I drew in Photoshop, all the voices are me (albeit distorted in Audacity), and all the sound effects are from soundsnap.com, with the exception of the radio, which is an actual clip of Japanese radio.
The title of the animation is "Hello, goodbye, where is my cake?"The script (in English) follows:
Yuusuke: I'm home!
Mom: Welcome home.
Mom: Yuusuke, there's some cake on the table, you know.
Yuusuke: Yes, thanks.
Yuusuke: Mom, is there milk in the refrigerator?
Oji: I don't know. Your mother's in the kitchen.
Yuusuke: Who are you?...What are you?
Oji: I'm Oji. How do you do?
Yuusuke: Where do you come from?
Oji: I come from outside your house.
Yuusuke: Is that so? You speak Japanese, don't you?
Oji: Yeah, that's so. This room is your bedroom, isn't it? This bedroom is a very clean bedroom, you know.
Yuusuke: Umm... Thanks.
Oji: What kind of book is this?
Yuusuke: It's a Japanese literature book. It's not very good, you know.
Oji: This house is a pretty house, you know. What kind of people live here?
Mom: Yuusuke, who's in your room?
Yuusuke: No one's here, Mom. It's the stereo.
Mom: It's very loud.
Oji: It's nice out today. There are pretty things outside your window.
Yuusuke: Yes, that's so.
Oji: Um... I'm leaving. Your mother's cake is tasty cake, you know. See you later.
Yuusuke: ...Mom, there's no cake.
And that's it. As you can tell, the conversation doesn't look terribly natural on paper, which bothers me, but I like to think it makes more sense when you put the animation with it. I would have still liked to be able to say more, though - the language I'm using for the script sounds very, very formal to me, especially since the situation is "you've just found an alien creature in your room." I would have liked to be able to add some indignant, scared, or otherwise more emotional language to the scene, but I just don't know any. Hopefully I'll learn some in the near future.
I chose to do this particular project because it was everything my last project wasn't - sound, movement, and color. I felt like I gave a strong showing of my written Japanese skills last time, so I really wanted to do a project that was more speech-oriented. Granted, I'm not as good at speaking as I am at writing, and it shows, but I'm a beginner, so I guess I'll let myself off the hook. I tried to use a different vocabulary set as well, making use of vocabulary I had literally just learned (in fact, I revised my script twice mid-animation to include vocabulary I had learned that day - including the negative form, in particular) and phrases that didn't get much play in my last project (like more natural descriptions of a house, salutations, and ね／よ).
This was really my first major foray into speaking Japanese presentationally, and I have to say, I need more practice. I spent a lot of time recording and re-recording my voice to make it sound more natural, but I had to turn in the project sometime, so it is what it is now. It sounds kind of off to me, but I'm not sure how much of that is because I'm just not used to speaking Japanese and how much is owed to my just being a terrible, terrible voice actress. I have very little natural intonation in my voice, so I should probably just practice repeating the intonation from Japanese sound clips to get it right.
Overall, I feel like this is a weaker showing of my Japanese skills than my first project, but it's definitely an improvement over my audio samples in terms of speaking skills and just a little less than on par with my first project in terms of vocabulary and language usage.