Audio Post: Animation Project (part 1)

This week we're going to continue to work on our audio post skills by doing all the sound for a short animated clip. Cartoons are another special category of film/video from an audio perspective because there is no original sound to work with, or try to imitate. You can make up the whole sound of the world from scratch! There are no real rules and you are basically trying to make things sound even bigger and crazier than they do in real life.

Here is a clip of the Disney film, "Steamboat Willie" the first animated short to have a completely post-produced soundtrack (music, dialog and fx)! Pay attention to the kinds of sounds that are being used and try to see if you can think of what sorts of objects were actually being used to make the sounds you're hearing:



For today's assignment, you're going to be working with a modern piece of animation. One thing that you need to do in addition to working with all the FX is to create an FX List, which is literally a list of the actions in the film that are going to require FX and the times at which they happen in the movie.

For your assignment, please do the following:

1. Create a new Pro Tools session
2. Import the video called dpaa_animation fx to your session. (Media Share>Audio Post Materials>dpaa_animation fx)
3. Now Copy the file called Audio Post_FX List from the Media Share to your computer and open it.
4. In Pro Tools, hit the SPACEBAR to playback the movie. Watch the whole thing through once.
5. Now watch it again and as you go through it, drop Memory Locators at all the major actions.
6. After you've got all your locators, click through them one by one and write down the time info and a description of the sound in your FX List.
7. Now go to File>Import and find all the FX you need and import them to either the region list or individual tracks.
8. Consider using a microphone to add your own original sounds (grunts, human noises, etc.) Remember that the goal is to make this as realistic as possible.
9. Do some mixing and automating. Especially concentrate this time on the panning of things (cars moving from side to side, etc.)
10. Save this as your name_animation FX and have an instructor check it.
    
11. Export the whole thing as a Quicktime movie and turn it into the folder called Animation FX in Student Work.
12. Also turn in your FX list document. Be sure to put your name in the file name: your name_Audio Post_FX list.