Audio, Sound and Score
"Films are 50% visual and 50% sound.
Sometimes sound even overplays the visual."
David Lynch Sound is just as crucial to your animation as your visuals. What we hear – the sound design is
often just as important and as complex as what is shown on the screen.
Even so, a number of students ignore sound, leaving it to the last minute - resulting in very poor quality audio. The aim of this module is to build on last semesters work by introducing key elements of sound design including:
Music and score can add emotional attitude in tone, mood and character. Using musical themes and motifs, music can foreshadow change in atmosphere, situation and plot.
Atmosphere / Ambient sound is the background sounds in a scene or location – such as wind, water, traffic, crowds, etc.
Dialogue – the voice, can add texture, tone and personality to your characters. Usually a conversation between two or more people – dialogue is often shown as lines or passages in a script that are intended to be spoken.
Lip sync - (short for lip synchronization) is a technical term for matching lip movements with sung or spoken, pre-recorded vocals.
Foley / Sound effects are often added in Post Production and are reproductions of everyday sounds, adding believability and quality to audio for films, television, games and radio.
Through a series of lectures, technical workshops and exercises the module will give you an opportunity to work individually as well as part of small, collaborative groups - it will challenge you, excite you and push you to develop your creative voice.
You will complete 3 assessed components which relate to the core processes used in Part 1: Lip sync
Part 2: Sound design Part 3: Short Script
and analysis of how they relate to the art of Animation.
Lip Sync (DONE)
Character Design along with the basic principles of animation: timing, spacing, exaggeration, stretch and squash may start to make an animated film, but there is still something missing. To understand Lip synch, is to start to understand human movement and reaction. We don’t just speak with our mouths; we speak with our eyes, faces, hands... in fact the whole body!
For this component of the module you will focus on the mechanics of creating a talking character as traditional animation, stop motion and CGI. We will then move on to look at how characters communicate with their whole bodies, not just their mouths.
You will be shown how to use Dope Sheets to construct your animation. These are used in the industry to break down a dialogue audio track into phonetic sounds ready for animation. They are also a great way to plan out your characters bodily animation for the whole scene.
You will be using three dialogue tracks from ‘The 11 Second Club’ - the MONTHLY Character Animation Competition, as the basis for your lip sync work; one per month.
We will start with traditional drawn animation techniques, and then we will look at replacement heads and articulated mouths for stop motion, 2D digital Toon Boom and Maya blend shapes.
You will have to submit your final animations to the 11 Second Club website for the deadlines on:
Thursday 31st October Saturday 30th November Friday 20th December
* October Lip Sync: https://vimeo.com/79520751
Sound Design (DONE)
For this component of the module you will focus on the creation of a short, original sound design – exactly 1 minute in duration. You will support this soundscape with a short animatic that illustrates your themes, development of ideas or concepts as well as demonstrating your understanding of the relationship between audio and visual.
Your sound-scape must include: Atmospheric track
Music / score track Dialogue track Foley sound effects track
– balanced to create one over-all sound file.
You will be introduced to Bar sheets and the role they play in helping to arrange sound for animation purposes. Using this you will go onto design a storyboard, and filming the animatic to the sound.
Collaboration is an important aspect of the animation and film industries. By working with other artists and professionals with specialist skills it helps us to push and achieve our creative goals. For that reason you must collaborate with others on at least one of the audio tracks listed above.
To help, we have arranged a collaborative networking event “Keep the Noise Down!” on Thursday 07th November, 2-4:30PM (H127) with students from the Music Technologies Awards. The aim of this event is for everyone to hear about your ideas and for you to start forming collaborative relationships with composers and sound-designers.
You need to prepare a short presentation of your ideas to the group to allow you to start negotiating working partnerships that you can develop over the following weeks of the Semester. THIS IS AN ASSESSMENT CRITERIA and ALL students are asked to participate.
Her smile was deadly but amused, and she blinked slowly at him, “I would bode better back in my own environment and not trapped in here like a miniature ship in a bottle. I am not an object to be owned and kept in secret, hidden from others. If you want me to be healthier, then it is the depths you must release me to, and I shall be.”
She looked him up and down, then her attention drifted to the window. “I might even reward you, and your crew. I know the locations of many lost treasures; buried beneath sand and rock…I could show them to you? Mark them on a map for you to find and claim?”
He chuckled, leaning close, his one eye on her "Do you know how I lost this eye?" he asked slowly, taking the plate of bones from the top of her tank.
"It was gouged out, deep beneath the depths after one of your kind managed to rend a hole in the hull. The ship went down and took me with it. Only after I surfaced, there was much more blood" he said darkly, unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a strange scar. It was almost as if it had been designed. "and this is my reminder..."
Short Script (DONE)
During four evening workshops you will learn about scriptwriting and will develop a short narrative film script, looking at character, dialogue and narrative structure. You will look at the origins of original stories and learn how novels are adapted to screenplays and onto scripts.
We will look at developing a stronger film language and think about shot composition and the juxtaposition of elements within the confines of the screen.
You may wish to use elements of this short script to use in your final sound design, so it’s important to have a few ideas prior to the workshops.
* I ended up writing two scripts, one was for my short animation for the course while another was a story I had written years ago that I wrote again in Script form.
Short Animation Script:
“Friendly Foy” Screenplay
By
Gemma Birks
INT. DINNING ROOM – MORNING (10 A.M.)
Camera follows the light from a window
with the curtains messily opened toward Medusa, a snake, coiled up on a rug.
Mouse runs passed the open doorway,
followed a few beats after by Bastet, a cat, licking at her paw in a sort of
challenge.
INT.
HALLWAY – NEXT
Medusa goes after Bastet, seeing Bastet
turn a corner into another room after the mouse.
INT.
DRAWING ROOM – NEXT
Medusa turns into the large drawing room
and spots the mouse under a nearby chair. She flicks her tongue out and then speeds
toward it, dodging the legs of a coffee table and a metal lamp stand.
The mouse sees her coming, squeaks and
runs just as Medusa’s jaws snap shut an inch or two behind it. She follows,
bending and squirming around any and all obstacles in her path before her body goes
still, she looks back and finds Bastet’s paw keeping her in place and Medusa
hisses, turning back around to approach Bastet but stops just out of reach,
having tied herself up around the objects in the room.
Bastet purrs and goes after the mouse.
Medusa unravels herself and knocks a lamp over onto Bastet’s tail making her
screech.
Medusa slithers around Bastet quickly
and goes after the mouse again.
INT.
DINNING ROOM – NEXT
The mouse waves quickly and skilfully
around chairs and the table legs. Bastet joins the chase once her tail is free.
Medusa and Bastet use objects around to
trip or block each other.
Medusa coils around a chair and pushes
it into Bastet’s path. Bastet knocks over a vase and ties Medusa’s tail around
a table leg.
Medusa unties her tail and looses sight
of both the mouse and Bastet. Medusa looks around for them.
INT.
KITCHEN – NEXT
Medusa pops her head in to look for
them.
INT.
HALLWAY – NEXT
Medusa looks down the empty hallway.
INT.
DINING ROOM - NEXT
Sad, Medusa goes back to her sunbathed
place, but spies the mouse again on the other side of the door to the drawing
room.
INT.
DRAWING ROOM – NEXT
Medusa opens the door with her tail and
goes after the mouse, knocking bodily into Bastet in the process.
They chase the mouse, and each time they
get close, the mouse gets away.
Medusa and Bastet look at each other and
soon they pay more attention to each other than the mouse.
The mouse sits by watching, bemused, and
catching it’s breath.
Medusa and Bastet fall to the ground
near the mouse, panting. They see the mouse, remember it as the reason they
were playfully fighting, and go after it again.
The mouse dodges and dives and then
finally escapes through an open window.
Medusa and Bastet gape and then turn to
look at one another in embarrassed dismay.
Story Script:
“Paper and Dirt” Screenplay
By
Gemma Birks
Title: When I was young - Prologue – Paper
and Dirt
Word count (this section): 759
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Alan Moore.
EXT. DANIEL BACKGARDEN – MORNING (9 A.M.)
Daniel (six years old) is playing with a paper aeroplane
in a neat and healthy garden, flowers bright and colourful line the back and a
grand tree with a small wooden tree house snug in it’s branches, stands to the
far right.
After the paper aeroplane falls to the ground, Daniel
picks it up and frowns in thought, inspecting the tip of the plane through his
overly large brown-rimmed glasses before refolding the plane and throwing it
again.
Plane seems to fly perfectly for a moment, Daniel is
grinning in triumph and tries to touch it in the air. Plane wobbles and goes
down over the garden fence.
DANIEL
Oh no!
Daniel rushes forward, falls over his feet a moment,
glances back at his house in panic because of the dirt on his usually clean clothes,
finds no one watching him and scrambles to the fence, pushing up on his tiptoes
to look over to no avail.
Finding a hole in the wood he peers through.
INT. NEIGHBOURS GARDEN
The garden is overgrown and unkempt; weeds and rusting pieces
of metal litter the space. The paper aeroplane is nowhere in sight.
EXT. DANIEL’S GARDEN
Daniel steps back, looking sad and turns to head back
into the
He sighed sadly and stepped back, looking downcast while
turning to head back inside.
A strange boy appears from the other side of the fence,
gripping it and looking over at Daniel and surprising him. The boy is grubby;
dirt caked into his ruddy cheeks and red hair.
DANIEL
Uh, hello. I didn’t know anyone
lived in that house. How long have you been living there? It can’t have been
long I bet…unless you like your garden to be so--
BOY
(interrupting meekly)
Don't live here. I just come here
to get away from her.
DANIEL
(frowning)
Her? Who?
BOY
(bowing his head)
My mom…
DANIEL
Your mother? Why are you getting away
from her, you should stay near her or you might get lost…
BOY
(Holds up the crushed paper
aeroplane)
Is this yours?
DANIEL
(Beaming and jumping in happiness)
Yes! Thank you! I thought I had
lost it for good.
(Takes it and straightens it out)
It's a really good design, if I do
say so myself. I would love to fly, wouldn't you?
BOY
(shrugging)
Never thought about it. But I
s'pose it would be nice…
DANIEL
What's your name?
BOY
Walter…
DANIEL
(Thrusts out hand for handshake)
My name's Daniel, nice to meet you.
Walter nods and shakes Daniel’s hand once before letting
go, leaving a dirty imprint stained onto Daniel’s palm.
