Extended Practice: Sound

I'd admittedly been putting off producing sound for my animation and instead have been favouring producing as much animation as possible. It's not that I was never going to add sound. It's just that I wanted to produce as much footage as possible first before adding sound after. However I had been given regular feedback from Annabeth, my musician, and other animators that I should be currently considering sound. Markus my musician had informed me on our last meeting that the more sound I have the easier it'll be to score.

In preparation for a presentation in which we watched all of our animations together where sound was going to be an important part. I spent the day compiling sounds. I began by producing a list of all the sounds I would need for my animation.

From looking at this list it was evident that compiling sound was going to take a lot longer than I'd previously anticipated. 

I cast fellow second year animator Daniel goodman to play the cop. I felt like he would be the perfect choice because even though he has got quite a masculine voice, he is also quite softly spoken of which is exactly what I am going for with this animation. Recording his sounds was quite a successful experience as he was very natural at it considering I had not given him the easiest job. I had not given him the easiest job because there is obviously no talking at all in my animation so it's not like he could just read lines off a script. I had to verbally describe sounds and grunts his character would make.

The complicatedness of the task did not stop there however. When it came to editing the sounds he had made into the animation that was a difficult task as well. In most animation, the sound is recorded first so the sound can be animated. However here I had done it the other way round. I do not regret working this way as I really needed to watch the movement of the animation to judge what sounds should go over it. I don't think I would have been fully able to realise what sounds I would need, simply with a guide being my animatic. On the other hand, my Live Action Video does do a significantly better job at showing mw what sound effects I need where so perhaps I could have used this as a guide. This is probably what I'll do from now on. Considering the time I have left to complete all of the animation and all of the sound, I feel it would be irresponsible to leave sound to the very end as I now realise it is not a day long job, it is in fact at least a week long job.

Furthermore, when compiling audio clips for my animation it was evident that my fellow animators were compiling clips that were to serve the purpose of being 'demo' clips. For example, Oscar had informed me that much of the sound he had spent time editing into his animation he was wanting to replace further down the production process. While I understood this way of working as it shows you exactly where sounds will go and sort of what they will sound like in the final product. I felt like working this way for me personally was a waste of time. Because I was inexperienced at sound editing I felt like compiling sounds was taking long enough, why would I want to spend any time finding a sound clip and editing it into my animation if I did not have the full intention of using it. Therefore instead I decided to work in a way where all the sound I found I wanted to be a high enough quality for me to keep as my final sound, if I do decide I don't like the sounds I've used I will happily replace them but due to my timekeeping skills I did not want to waste anytime with this process. 

Had I the chance to do this project again I would definitely try to recruit someone else to do the sound for my animation. It was short sighted of my to assume it would not take long considering this is something people do as a degree I'm trying to do to a professional standard in such a short space of time. However I am nor regretful of taking on the task in this project. Even though from the start I have been advised that distributing the work amongst other fellow animators would be more efficient, having taken on to some extent all areas of the film's production has allowed me the chance to learn in areas before I did not know to much about.