So depsite the fact I own a fair collection of sounds that are really suited to this style of animation, I created a few of the sounds from scratch myself. This was due to various reasons like not being able to find a suitable sound effect or to replicate human noises like sniffing, breathing, sighing and gulping.
Using a ZOOM H4M Handy Digital Multi Track Recorder, a portable recorder extremely useful for recording on site sounds and interviews, I recorded myself making various noises to later import in to Pro Tools and attempt to mix in to the animation.
The problems faced here were making the sounds too ‘real’ sounding, so they almost stood out from the animation cartoon like noises that were already in there from the samples. After altering the EQ of these self recorded samples to sit in the mix better, taking out a small bit of the high end and boosting the bass slightly also, they had a lot more of a smooth sound and didn’t stand out of place like they did before altering the EQ.
‘Choosing the right sound/audio helps the flow of an animation it adds illusion to the audience in just listening on it. Sound brings all emotions to the audience. Sound effects has a big role in delivering or expressing an action of a certain character or in identifying the event happen in a certain scene.’ (Awiera, 2012).
The quote above helped us understand more about the sounds we were putting into the animation. As previously mentioned, there is no dialogue in this animation and we knew from the off that it would rely on sound to express the emotions and how the scene is supposed to feel and this proves we were right. We knew that we had to make sure our sounds gave off the right message and delivered the right feeling and emotion to the audience in order to get the story across sucessfully. Keeping in this in mind we carried on full steam ahead, working on creating the right kind of sound effects.
So far everything has worked out smoothly and communication between ourselves and the director/animator have been flawless, with a good feedback system we are able to make the changes he wants to happen quickly and easily with a good guideline.
