Welcome#

This is where your film comes together to become a real film for the first time! It's where you put your shots in order and make any last adjustments to the timing of all of the emotional beats of your story. It's where you transform your work, which has been completely silent for weeks, into something with music and sound that has the potential to fully immerse your audience.

Assignments#

Assemble your Shots into an Edit#

Watch / Read:

Take all of your renders and assemble your edit.

Editing an animation tends to be a bit simpler than editing a film because you usually only end up animating that shots you need. So sometimes editing is as simple as importing your shots, one at a time, into the video editor.

Build the Sound Design#

Sound Design is a field of study unto itself. Will we only touch on it briefly in this class as we use a bit of Sound Design to make each film feel immersive.

Watch this 15min video of me demoing the basics of sound design to get a sense of what the process looks like (I'm using Premiere for this demo. The techniques are identical in Blender's Video Editor).

Then start looking for your own sources of sound effects at:

freesound.org, a fantastic library of creative commons sounds.

And if you’re feeling ambitious, record some of your own!

Create Ambience#

Ambience is the general feeling of a moment, shot or scene. It’s relatively rare to have absolute silence on the audio track. More often than not you’ll want some sort of ambient sound to fill up each moment (e.g. quiet whispering, calm ocean waves, chickens clucking nearby, grease frying, wind blowing, cars honking, jack hammers hammering, fire crackling, etc.) If you’re looking for ambient inspiration put on your favorite movie and watch until you come upon a moment with no dialog, no music, and not a lot of action. Ask yourself, what’s happening on the soundtrack in that moment?

Synchronize Image and Sound#

Sync is any sound effect that is carefully timed to match the visuals in your animation (e.g. the heel of a boot hits a pine floor board, a squeaky tricycle wheel rolls along the carpet, a window sash slides open, a whistle blows). Sync sound is different from ambient sound because sync sound is always tied to a bit of visual action or to a storytelling cue.

Build Complex Sounds by Layering Effects#

Complexity refers to the challenge of making your Sound Design effective. It is rare to find the perfect sound effect. Much more often you’ll finding yourself needing to build the perfect sound effect out of a collection of simpler sound effects (e.g. a big door slamming shut might require the combined effect of a wooden door slam, and iron gate crashing shut, two bricks clacking together, a clinking metal hook and a rush of wind). Keep your Sound Design from feeling thin by building complexity.