Cartoon Audio When You Don't Have a Budget or a Clue
Weirdly, in his otherwise great book "The Animator's Survival Kit", Richard Williams recommends not listening to music while animating. To me this sounds a bit crazy: repetitive drawing without some kind of audio to break up the monotony is more like torture than a creative technique. But in a way, it kind of makes sense. Audio timing/tone and visual timing/tone go together so closely in cartoons that any intrusion on their blending is suspect.
For Eight Uncomfortable Robots, I knew early on that I wanted my film to be hand-drawn with digital effects in post. But other than occasionally helping out with the soundboard at church, I didn't have much experience with audio engineering. Anyway, here's what I ended up doing:
- I recorded foley on my iPhone. The cat that meows is named Cosette and the name of the cat that purrs is Hemingway. The bubbling during the toilet scene is a fishtank. I recorded the robot lines with a voice changer toy that I bought from a Halloween store.
- For the sounds that I couldn't record myself, and all of the music, I used the wonderful resource FreeSound.org. As far as I can remember, these are all of the uploads that I used on Eight Uncomfortable Robots:
- Perspire
- Birds
- Silo
- Launch
- Drill
- Alarm
- Lazer
- I really appreciate the way you folks put your stuff out there for free. You're doing good work.
- I processed these raw sound files using Audacity. Audacity lets you boost audio, reduce noise, and copy/paste sounds together. It's a great tool, but I probably should have spent more time during this phase. Some of the foley on Robots has a bit too much background noise.
- Once I finalized the audio files I dropped them into iMovie to time it with my animations. I'm sure there are other, better, programs for this part of the process but I found the interface to be pretty intuitive.
In summary, it's definitely possible to do all of the audio for a short cartoon yourself without spending much (if any) money. My own short is unusual perhaps in that it works for the most part without dialogue. More dialogue would have required a better recording setup, probably, and more time in post. In the future I think I'd like to work more with voice actors.