All images are from Producing Independent 2D Character Animation: Making and Selling a Short Film, by Mark Simon. Reprinted with permission.

Steven Bak working on the sound effects for Lesson 3.

This is the ninth in a series of 12 excerpts from Mark Simon’s book, Producing Independent 2D Character Animation: Making and Selling a Short Film. This book is a full-color, concept-to-pitch guide that teaches animators, students and small studios the art and business of producing short, cel animated films. Animation producer Mark Simon has detailed the process in an accessible how-to manner using his award-winning series, Timmy’s Lessons In Nature, as a guide. This 432-page book contains more than 600 full-color images, interviews and a CD-ROM containing sample animation, animatics and sample software described in the text.

Music and sound effects are the final touches that give your project life. The right music can help your animation flow, and sound effects can give your work a solid feeling that adds to the illusion of life.

If you are lucky enough either to afford an outside audio house or to make a deal with one to provide you with music and sound effects, they will need the final edit of your animation to work with. Try to make sure that you don’t give an audio house a video file that does not have a locked edit, or the work they do might be a waste of time. Any timing changes you make in the video will throw off the audio timings. Check with the audio facility as to the format in which they would like to receive your video. They may ask you to provide them with a low-resolution .mov file or a simple VHS tape to work with. They will, in turn, provide you with an audio file that you drop into your edit suite.

On the third episode of Timmy’s Lessons in Nature, we had an Orlando music and sound design company, Sound “O” Rama, produce the music and sound effects. We provided Sound “O” Rama with a 320x240dpi .mov file of the final edit. They came up with a few samples of music for us based on the style of music we asked for. They then produced a custom music track that supported the action in our short. They added all the sound effects, from the chirping of the squirrel in the opening credits, to the vicious attack of the rabid fox. During the audio production, I would go to the studio and make notes as to what sounds I liked and what sounds needed to be enhanced. Once their work was done, they provided us with a stereo .wav file that we dropped into our Premiere [Adobe] edit suite.

ProTools screen capture from Lesson 3. Sound “O” Rama produced the sound effects and audio sweetening. ProTools would play the animation video file along with the audio.