referencing the use of sound

After trying to do some of the sound design for my film I realised it was a much bigger job than I first thought and one that I am not as good at as I thought.

I spent a few days compiling and editing sounds for this animation however I have come to realise I need to make more of my own sound effects. At the moment I have interim ones I have sourced online from sound libraries but I want to record lots of my own foley so I can get the exact sounds that I need for the animation. I also created interim sound for the characters in my animation but I need to cast some people to play the characters so each character has their own distinct voice (even though they don't speak)

I want to get better at sound design which means I need to study it more. I've come to realise for this project that sound design like animation is very stylistic and requires very appropriate selection to create a style of SFX. Its very important that the sound effects match the animation. This is something I've been struggling with balancing real noises with distinctly cartoon ones. I've been taking note on watching whilst watching a some cartoons on how they do they sound design but they are all very different.

I think for the very final edits of the film especially when thinking about sending it to festivals I will seek collaboration for the sound design because it is something I'm not the best at and slow at doing. I understand the importance of sound and do not want bad foley to drag my film down.

Production update

I have been carrying on production which seems to be slowly speeding up as I get better at animating each character.

We have frequently been having informal crits which have been very useful. Something Which I've been told to do is to sort out sound design, which my film is definitely lacking.

Something else that has been brought to my attention is that some of the scenes don't go on long enough to reinforce visual gags. Scenes such as the tap dribbling need to go on a bit longer so the audience can take in the scene laugh at the gag then move on to the next thing without being too rushed. This is something I will bare in mind for future scenes I animate.

here is some of the progress I've made so far:

sound scripting

I should have sorted out sound design at an earlier stage in the film but as always I ended up putting it off. I do want to sort out sound design as soon as possible so when I show people my film in progress it makes a lot more sense.

I started to script all the sound design that would I thought the film needed. I played through my footage and animatic scene by scene, writing down every sound effect that was needed. This included ambient/background noise, character sound fx, character "speech" and all other sound effects.

Now that I have this written I can start straight away on sourcing and creating sound.

Shot schedule

now that I was starting production I needed to make sure I stayed on top of my work load. Although gant charts are effective I often prefer using lists and creating monthly and weekly lists to stick to. I decided to make a list of all the shots I needed to complete in the film and if they were particulalry long of difficult breakdown that shot further.
Once I'd done this I had a very nice breakdown of my work, I started to take parts of this list and put them on a weekly completion list. This was a nice way to do it for me as I could work out after I'd started a bit of production how long I needed after a bit of experience. It also helped me balance the workload nicely with other things (Client work, PPP, ect)

going through background list

Before I started actually animating I wanted to complete all the backgrounds first. I decided this after we had a talk from Frasier Mclean who told us about the importance of layout. I figured since I was doing most of the layout during the creation of backgrounds it made sense to finish all the background work before production began. This meant I could animate straight onto finished backgrounds and I wouldn't run into any errors of things not matching up at a later stage in the production.
I made a list of every different shot that required a background and slowly went through the list creating all the backgrounds. I made sure each one was equipped with whatever specific lighting or moveable layers were needed for the scene to work so production would be as easy as possible.

timing errors

Something I quickly encountered in production were timing errors in my animatic. Although I felt the pacing of the animatic worked well often I needed longer for the movements of the shot and sometimes shots needed a bit more room to breath. Fortunately this hasn't added any extra time to production and a lot of it is resolved through holding frames. In future (although I tried to do so in this animatic) I need to put more movements into the storyboard to better time my shots.

title design

Title design is something I had not given a huge amount of consideration. One of the first shots in this animation is the title card and I didn't want to leave this till the end as I figured the production would benefit from having a title ready.

I wanted something that matched the tone of the film and the setting of that scene. Since the film is called thirsty and is a bit gross in general I wanted the text to reflect that. Since I'd had a lot of inspiration from classic 90's skate art e.g

So I wanted something that played off that.
I went for a drippy design to look somewhat like sweat which I then animate dripping in and fading out.

I am happy with the overall final look but I may need to tweak the text for posters and such.

starting production

I had now finished a large majority of the preproduction work so it was now to time to get start production on the animation. Since I was not using animate I decided to use photoshop for animating as I already had a good workflow in this software.
At this point in the production (just starting) I really want to keep corner cutting down, I am all for saving time but I want the animation to look the best that it can. I would rather it run over schedule but look its best. I really want to use this opportunity to improve my traditional animating skills so I will be keeping the use of after effects to a minimum.

trying animate cc

Since I wanted to animate this animation frame by frame I figured it might be worth altering my working pipeline. I remembered seeing a previous student using Animate cc (flash) to create their rough animation and then colouring their animation in photoshop. I thought this would work well for me as I prefer the look of colouring in photoshop compared to flash I thought the aesthetic would work better for this animation.
I got one of my starting scenes and decided to try and use flash to animate in. After asking a student who had started using animate I was given a good video tutorial that showed you how to use animate cc. The video was create by a youtuber/animator draw with jazza. The video went through all the basics of the software features and then went on to actually animating. Once I had learnt the basics of animate I started trying to animate with it. Although I thought the timeline in animate was brilliant I could not get passed the vectorised drawing in it. Although with more time this could have been a good option I had already given a lot of time to this and did not want to takeaway any more time away from animating. Therefore I decided to go back to using photoshop as my workflow was at a good pace using this.

twaeking animatic feedback

We had our first crit since creating our art books so this was a good opportunity to get some feedback. Everyone watched through my animatic and the response was very positive, my main fear was that the humour would not translate but the animatic was met with some laughter and that should improve when animation/sound is added. The main feedback was:

Consider sound really carefully and cast the two characters separately so each one was "voiced" by different people.

Slow down some of the camera movements I had put in the animation and think about adding easing to them.

Other than those feedback was crack on with animating.

creating a big tilt shot

one of the hardest shots in my film is one that involves a camera tilt (moving on its axis) whilst the camera was also panning (moving laterally). This shot is supposed to show what the main character sees in the cave and reinforce that it is him who is seeing all the weird creatures. I started by looking at Fraser Mcleans book about layout design, although it was helpful it did not fully resolve my issues with the final shot.

I attempted to create the shot experimenting with line work in photoshop and then moving it in aftereffects but all my attempts did not look right.

After speaking with a tutor the best cause of action was to test with live action filming to see how I could create this shot. After a few ideas I settled on a test that worked well, I draw a rough cave on a very long piece of card, which I shaped into the shape of a cave. I then moved a camera in the space how I want it to move in the animation. It was at this point that I realised how the layout of the shot would work.

paper test

Once I understood how the shot would move I started to do further tests. I drew the layout to the correct size and tested it in after effects. This confirmed that the layout worked and I could create the final background in the layout. 

Once I had finished the entire background I went to animate all the characters that would fit into the space. I used past designs from this project as reference. There were all animated to loop so I can run them for as long as needed meaning I could work out the timings of the shot at a later date.

The problem with working with this shot was that it was very large which meant it ran very slowly in aftereffects. This was significantly slowing my workflow so I needed to solve this. I decided to pre-render all the separate animations in the sequence then put them back in, this sped everything up a lot.

This is a breakdown of creating the shot

further background work

Once I had established the overall look of the backgrounds (colour palette, line thickness, texturing) to all fit together I created a list of all the background that would be needed for the whole animation.

I started with one background from each main location (e.g desert, cave, house) so I could define the palette of these locations as well as make sure they all work in succession. It was important to me that the backgrounds didn't just look nice but really help to tell the story. For the house it was really important that it really helped layout who the main character was (messy, crusty, lazy) and the other parts of the story were reinforced particularly the mood. I did this through colour and added details

I really enjoyed working on the backgrounds for this animation here are a few examples:

The inside of the house are the only backgrounds that have texture to make it look really gross and messy.

It was important that the backgrounds it the desert were really bright to contrast the house. It was a challenge to make these backgrounds simple but also keep them interesting.


The cave backgorunds are all fairly dark, always with directional lighting to reinforce that all the light comes from the middle were all the creatures lurk. I wanted the cave to feel a little creepy and uncomfortable as well since the character doesn't like being there so the colours I chose should reflect that.