Applied Animation: Editing, Cutting and Re-recording Sound

Whilst Katy was working on creating the textures and storyboards for our animation, I was in charge of editing and cutting the recordings we had gathered earlier that week. Again, this is something that I'm not familiar with, yet I was eager to learn, as it I am genuinely interested in sound editing and wanted to see what could be achieved within the software available to me, this software being Audition. Audition is a program that I didn't even knew existed until I started my degree and it is something, until now, I have never actually used or thought about, or even knew what it was used for, for that matter. Despite this however, I found the software extremely straight forward to use in terms of importing a sound file and cutting it down and I was able to put together a rough cut to accompany our animatic.

Editing/ Cutting Sound

However, this is as far as I have managed to get with the software, although I did learn that I could alter the height of the sound waves as a whole and in certain sections. I feel that this would be extremely useful, as I found that Max's recording is a lot louder than Matt's and Katy's is a mixture of both. I will need to learn how to use this function properly though and I have decided to research how to achieve this and go and see workshop support to see if anyone is free to teach me how the program works.

Adjusting the height of the sound waves

I will also have to research/ learn how to blend together our recordings with background sound to help make it appear as though the characters are in a forest setting. I feel that this could possibly be a factor that will make or break our whole animation because if the sound doesn't match our visuals it won't have the same effect and it will let the rest of the animation down. Sara also stressed that this is a very important element of the animation and whilst both she and Martin are pleased with our voice recordings (they are very clean), I need to consider sound very carefully and try my best to make the two blend seamlessly. Again, I feel that I would benefit from reaching out to workshop support to gain some 'hands-on' help rather than just sitting at my computer reading about what I should be doing.

Whilst editing, I realised that some of the clips weren't as clean as I would have liked them to be, and because the audio has such a huge impact on an animation, I requested that they be recorded again, which our voice actors were more than willing to do. 

Matt and Max recording Audio

These recordings came out a lot cleaner and I was happy with the overall dialogue and felt that it was what we were looking for. I was really pleased with how well the pair did and I'm really pleased with what we have to work with in terms of dialogue. Having said this however, I do feel that some of Katy's clips need to be re-recorded, as I feel that they seem to portray the wrong mood, for instance in one of the questions she sounds incredibly bored and uninterested, which is the complete opposite of what we want our characters to sound like, as this would imply to an audience that the subject matter isn't important or interesting. We also need to record some of the actions that take place within the script, for instance Katy's character attempts to pull up a worm at one point and struggles a little, yet she didn't make any noise to accompany the action.

For now I am happy with what we have and I feel that we can re-visit the sound booth throughout the post-production stage. Right now I want to focus on production and will return to sound editing as we come closer to post-production.