I hate sound (check out the video montage though)

But sadly it must be done. I have final completed the sound file for my animation, I can now begin to time my animation to the 1 min 7 seconds it lasts (my animation is going to be 1675 frames long!). There are three songs

1. Shoot the runner by Kasabian
2. Gothic Anthem by Gothminister (thank you Martin)
3. Elements of life by Tiesto

In between the tracks is an explosion followed by a rewind sound effect, here is where I plan for the camera to spin around the dance floor and add lots of motion blur. The reason that I added an explosion was that when I was trying to mix the sounds all together, keeping the animation in mind, it was not working with just the rewind sound effect. It was actually whilst listening to radio 1 that I heard an advert for Tim Westwood that used an explosion cover up a mix between two different genres it worked really well. To mix all the sounds together I used Adobe Audition. In this programme, after mixing all the sounds together I normalised all the tracks so that they were all playing at the same volume.

You may remember me mentioning a log time ago that as a group we are all beginning our animations on the outside of our room’s door, having the door open and entering the room to begin and finishing on looking at the inside of our door. We will then, as a group, animate from the end of each others animation to the start of the next persons animation via the building halls. (Trust me, this will be important info in a bit).

After I had finished making my mix track it came out a bit too long so I began the process of trimming it down to length (1 min, agreed by the group). I eventually had the idea to cut a large chunk off the beginning as it would save me 15(ish) seconds. The problem was that now the music seemed to start a bit sudden and didn’t sound right. The solution I came up with is that it can begin whilst the camera approaches my room through the hall. Now I had more work to do, I had the break point in the track but I needed to decide on the speed that the volume would increase and the start part would need to be muffled until the door opens. After much messing about I have the volume continually and steadily increasing over the course of the first part from 0 to 50% then the second part of the audio, which is where my personal animation will start, there is a sharp jump from 50% to 100% which is where the doors will open. I managed to get a muffled effect in Audition using the Graphic EQ and removing the treble but as it turns out the effect can not be gradually reduced (as the doors open) so its an ‘all or nothing’ effect. To solve this issue I decide that I knew how to do it in Premier Pro, so that’s what I did. I exported the two separate sounds from Audition with the changing volumes and then in Premier Pro I keyframed in and out the treble to simulate the muffled effect then exported the audio again as separate tracks. The result of all this work is that I now have two separate tracks, one flows seamlessly in to the other and the volume increases as you approach and finally when the doors open the muffled effect disappears.

Below is a video montage of the creation of the sound (sped up obviously) with the completed track as backing music, it shold be a delight for the eyes and the ears. Since making it I have moved the break slightly and the bass and treble transition now runs over the break but you get the idea. The break is at 12 seconds. Enjoy.