How about another #sounddesign thread? With gifs! This time about #BigHero6 and some tricks for humor.
Animations are fun because no sound is recorded on “set.” It’s a blank slate.
#filmsound #soundeffects #filmmaking #fieldrecording #audiopost #postproduction
Animations are fun because no sound is recorded on “set.” It’s a blank slate.
#filmsound #soundeffects #filmmaking #fieldrecording #audiopost #postproduction
I love recording funny sounds. Baymax’s squeaky body was a yoga ball I sat on at work (good for spine!). There are so many ways to perform a squeaky prop. I manipulated every phrase I could out of it. Fast, slow, rhythmic, impacty. It had a nice resonant “inflated” feel.
A lot of humor both visual and sonic comes from rhythm and pacing. (Sometimes in writing too!) A squeak in just the right moment, or a beat of silence so the next sound has more impact. Play with expectations.
There were three versions of Baymax to design: his inflated rubber body, his first clunkier armor, and his final high tech armor. Each was a distinct sonic palette.
My favorite sound is Baymax’s eye blinks. I made several alternate versions of this, but in the end we went with the original sound from the picture department guide tracks. It was the most funny. I pitched a bunch of versions for variation and made an “edit pack” file.
A big moment like a crash can be funny by using clarity, rhythm, and variations in material/quality. Hearing the same kind of impact a bunch of times (or a mush of indistinguishable noise) isn’t funny or interesting.
Some examples in this teaser!
Dynamic pitching can add so much emotion, and can turn almost any sound into a sort of vocal, a phrase with feeling and expression. Exaggerated pitching can be an easy way to make something funnier and more ear-catching.
Sometimes simple sounds can take the most time to find in a sound library. An editor may spend an hour hunting for just the right squeak, in tens of thousands of files. Metadata helps the excavation (get creative in search terms), but not all files are labelled well.
It can be helpful to tag emotions & ideas in description metadata. Is a sound funny? Spooky? Weird? Cold? Sometimes when I’m searching, I don’t look for a material or an action/object, but simply browse the things others have tagged as, say, strange or of a certain emotion.
And in the end, it's all about eliciting emotion. 😉 Thanks for reading!
