Audio for Animation: Try These Tricks

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By Bryant Falk

When we watch a piece of animation, it’s amazing how much we can take for granted sometimes. It’s fascinating to stop and think about how audio for animation is fully created from scratch.

We have our three main ingredients for creating audio: dialogue, music, and sound effects. With animation, careful planning must take place to get them all to coordinate.

But what if you don’t have the time or the resources for meetings with animators, audio production people, or others involved in the process? How can you still get everything to come together?

Dialogue:

This is probably the most tricky to work around. When your animation character says something, his mouth needs to be in sync with the audio. The question is, how many shots really need to show the mouth of your character? If you can keep it to a minimum, this will allow the animator to move much quicker. For example, if your evil villain has a line, why not push in and show his sinister eyes close up? Then it’s just a semi-sync of dialogue.

Now, in a two-shot, you have your establishing shot, (usually medium showing both characters) and your over-the-shoulder close-ups. These over-the-shoulder shots can be showing the reaction of the characters being talked to instead of only the character talking. This will allow that semi-sync again, much less work for the animator.

Also, keep in mind medium shots of action with dialogue running on the scene. Your character will be too small to have to worry about sync!

Music:

When working with limited resources, a lot of times the composer must get something together without a picture. Well, how can that be done? Carefully! Here are some quick rules of thumb to get you in the ballpark.

If you’re doing an MTV-style animation with lots of cuts, your music should move in an eighth or sixteenth note style. Think of “Blue Suede Shoes” by Elvis. Reference this at a standard 120 bpm, and you will see, it will allow you many chances to move your video edit to hit in sync.

For slower romantic moments, ask for something moving with a quarter, half, and whole notes. A reference for this could be “Falling in Love” (also an Elvis classic in 3/4 time).

With these style references, you should have more options on where you can make cuts in your animation.

Sound Effects:

This is the easiest of the three. Since sound effects tend to be momentary, they allow for a lot of room to be put in. You may want to have a number of different tracks to handle the different lengths of sound effects. I like to keep longer effects, such as jet engine or lawn mower effects, on one track, while having car horns and door slams on another track. A short animation of 2 minutes or less can have an average of 10 to 12 sound effects tracks depending on the requirements of your project.

Keep in mind that the more you can plan ahead on an animation project, the more you can save on the back end. And when working with limited resources trying to build in flexibility. From music to dialogue, many cost-saving options can be created!

Illustrations: Animation by James Buran for Spytime intro.

Bryant Falk has been a producer and engineer for over 12 years working with such clients as Coca-Cola, Sports Illustrated, Valley National Bank, MTV’s The Shop, and The Ricki Lake Show. He is at School of Visual Arts  and is t

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