So far, I’ve only talked about creating the images for our film, but sound and music are extremely important, and can be quite time consuming. One of the reasons that the animatic was so important for our tight-deadline project was that it gave us something to write music to before any animation was done. As as I’d finished the animation edit, we could start adding the sound effects. I’ve probably posted enough charts over the past month, but here’s one more:
That is the timeline for the whole project. Ideally, the scripting period should have been longer, but you can see that by creating an animatic at the beginning of the project, the composers were able to use the entire month. To a lesser extent, so was the sound effects department. The storyboards showed the action pretty well, and from that we could see what sounds we would need; swords clashing, cannons firing, and creaking ships. Most of these sounds we found on the internet, but many we recorded ourselves. All of them needed to be adjusted and sweetened so that they could work together.
We used the many powerful filters of Adobe Audition to turn fuzzy, static-filled, mono internet clips into cleaner, more expansive stereo tracks. Our own recorded sound effects needed tweaking as well, and we added ambience, subtle reverb, and stereo offsets to simulate a more “open sea” type of environment. We built this library out until the first edit was finished, and then were able to begin matching audio cues to visual actions and create a more realistic mix. This is extremely important for animated projects, since there isn’t any live sound captured on set.
