In terms of planning for the different sounds throughout the animation I feel like it's been swayed heavily and directed by the choices Wing and I have made as progression was made throughout the production process of the project. For example, during my exploration of the introductory sequence where the animation opens when a shot of the moon and then eases downwards to a shot of the barn from a three-quarter behind view, I thought that as the setting and time of day is night on a farm it would be mostly quiet. Except, perhaps for the sound of a breeze or crickets rife throughout the grassy areas depicted in the scene. In terms of viability it would be relatively easy to find recording or samples of this kind of sound online from a free source, and it would be a subtle addition to the ambience of the scene.
It was important to me to find the right song for the montage section in the middle of the animation. If we decided a song would be the best way to approach the sound for this section then I wanted the sound to add to the scene not take away from it. Hence why it was important to get the best and most fitting track as we could. There were several sound effects in which we thought would be nice to have in the animation, such as footsteps the sound of the shovel and the ground along with the sound of dirt. Wing found a perfect clip on youtube of someone tapping their fingers on various objects close to a microphone, I went through it and around 6 minutes into the video they make a heavy 'thudding' sound with their fingers which could work really well with the footsteps and the feel of the characters when their feet hit the floor to move. Furthermore, we both looked at the 'Youtube sound library' which contains a lot of free sounds for pretty much anything you can think of, and several versions of each. We looked at sound related to shovelling and digging along with the sound of different earthy materials like dirt and grit. I always find it quite difficult to obtain good sound, so for this project I was tempted to try and record our own sounds to fit our needs. However, as the time pressed on towards the end of the project it was obvious to us that it would be best to use royalty free sounds and concentrate mostly on the animation side of things so that we have a finished animation at the end of the project. These were obtained using the sound library on Youtube, and was used for sound effects such as the rustling of paper in the wind, and elements of the wind itself, as well as various dirt and shovel sounds.
The first sound clip I used was the tapping of the finger tips to emulate the sound of foot steps hitting the ground. I took the clip into Audacity and increased the level of bass as well as doing some noise reduction and general cleaning up of the sound so it was a goof fit for the scene. The original clip was around 15 minutes long so I listened to it and found the best 1 minute or so, or the minute of sound that I thought most closely resembled the footsteps of the character. I exported the file and imported it back into Premiere Pro to sync it up with the video. It took a little bit of time to match up the individual footsteps but in the end it worked out quite well. I used the same method for the sound of the character jumping and landing on the other side of the sty fence. I also include some subtle fades in the sound to make it sound as if it tapered off very quickly as a sound of this nature would. Next I downloaded the sound of paper rustling off the youtube sound library and added that into the Premiere Pro project. I played around with the volume to make it match up better with the way the poster in the animation is rustling. It isn't particular fast and so I changed the volume and length of the clip based on this factor in both of the scenes the poster is featured being affected by the wind. The final step for this sound was adding some fades and transitional elements to it, in order to make it seem like it was a little further away from the audience in terms of the volume of the sound. Finding the correct volume of individual sounds and their relationship with other was vital when it came to finding the balance. I put a big emphasis on the sound effects before the music starts to give the audience a sense of authenticity and weight with the combination of movement and sound. I think this set the montage scene well as the audience had a sense of how things sounded, and my concern before this was that the audience would only have the movement as a reference for weight and the general environment if we had only used music for the entire piece. Every time I created and implemented a sound I played the piece back through to make sure the volume height didn't reach the red but that it was at a happy medium in the top half of the mixer. I wanted the levels to be clear and audible but not too brash.
The music we used for the montage sequence was the original music we used in the animatic from the beginning of the project, so I'm glad we could stick with that until the end. I found that speeding the music up slightly adds a lot of drama and tension to the scene due to the quick pacing. I'm pleased that the original music worked this well with the original story board, animatic and now the final animation. Perhaps I could have found an even better piece somewhere or combined different pieces of music similar to the way I've combined different scenes but due to time constraints I think this was a little bit unrealistic.
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