Sound Design

In October I started reaching out to people in the music course to assist with the sound design and music. I filled out a form with one of the people I reached out to and gave ideas for the different sound elements my film will have, the kettle boiling, the wind, the rain, thunder etc. I was asked what I would like for the music, so I linked the soundtracks to Avatar the Last Airbender by Jeremy Zuckerman and The Secret of Kells by Bruno Coulais.  I want it to sound Irish, but not the Americanised view of Irish music, It will have a modern twist, and hopefully the characters will have their own themes.

In February I had a meeting to discuss the music and sound design further. I was asked if it is possible to make my film longer to have a longer score, I unfortunately had to say no as I am working on finding ways to make my him the opposite, shorter. We agreed that we won’t be able to do a finished piece of music until the timing is all set out for the film when it’s done, but we have been working with sound bites, and testing out different traditional Irish Instruments. We discussed the possibility of renting a studio space to record the score.

I am sourcing my sound effects from the BBC archive.

Voice acting

The voice actors for my characters was another important thing. I was able to get in contact with Chris O’Dowd and Ardal O’Hanlon to voice Biddy and Tommy respectively. I’m still quite shocked that these actors I really admire are in it! I sent each of them the script and a copy of the animatic to voice their lines. I am missing three lines from Chris so my own voice is subbed in there, and I only got the recording from Ardal a few days ago so the lip sync for Tommy will be slightly off. I originally animated Tommy to my own voice as well, here is a link to a folder with scenes of my original lip syncing – https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1R2gPwPyUIPNFp-qMfqFxofNjx3ZdJwJi?usp=share_link

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Compositing

I am putting everything together in after effects, with Toon Boom harmony I have the option to render the write nodes as PNG4s, which I can then import as an PNG sequence into After effects, I struggled to figure out how to do this, as whenever Imported my animation it wasn’t showing with a transparent background.

This video on exporting by ZeBird brain was a great aid

and this video by Toniko Pantoja helped me with importing

I have learned a lot about the ranges the after effects software can go with this video

They explain a lot of tricks with shading and lighting that I hope to put in my film, I don’t believe I will have time to do so for this college assignment, but I will work on it for the end of year show. Toon Boom Harmony is adapt for compositing, but I was finding the node views intimidating which caused me to composite in after effects instead.

I have underestimated how long compositing will take, I thought that it will be quick enough to insert the backgrounds and move the camera around, but this is taking several days.

When I had my scenes put together in after effects I brought them all into Premiere Pro, this was just to add the sound as I find Premiere Pro is more adapt for that. I exported the film as a HEVC file with Adobe Media encoder and now i’m done!

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