Animation sounds, Hunter or Gatherer?

Hello, I just got done watching a short Documentary about a behind the scenes of the sounds created for the movie “Wall-e.” I was watching it just to pick up anything i could, the fact that it was about Wall-e had nothing to do with this.

I havn’t made a handful of animations myself yet, but when i do try and make animations, sounds are what i struggle with the most. To be quite honest, i don’t think i know much about Foley, or at least, the kind of sound design used today on computers. I only had a 1 week foley course with a group of people but we did terrible and it was a live performance thing.

When it comes to creating sounds for animation, i have a few open ended questions that i would like to ask.


1.) Are there any programs great for doing this free or decently cheap to get started?

i’ve used Sony Vegas in the past but what’s hard about using a video editor like Sony vegas for sound is is that you only get about 3 or 4 audio tracks. So if many sounds are happening at once then you would have to render the entire thing and put it into another project to add more… and i think that creates some sort of video quality loss if i’m not mistaken.

2.) When it comes to getting sounds for animation, should i be gathering them from websites online, or going out and hunting for them myself?

I’m sure there’s more sounds i can make at home than i can imagine but i wonder if i’m clever enough to gather very many of them.

3.) Microphones… When recording voices should i use just any decent little microphone and buy a pop filter or something?

Thank you ^-^

  1. I use FL Studio for sound (since I know the software well) but that’s overkill, you can get away with Audacity and a few VSTs if you need to. There has got to be a better way… but generally I just write down timings in seconds to sync video to audio and vice-versa…

  2. Don’t bother recording something when you can download it for free. www.freesound.org will be 90% of what you’ll ever need as long as you’re creative with the sounds you find there. Record something only when you can’t find an adequate sample elsewhere or generate it artificially. Recording something well is tricky and time-consuming, so it’s best avoided when possible.

  3. Get the best mic you can afford and YES use a pop filter. Also pay close attention to the acoustic space you’re recording in. A sure sign of the rank amateur is recording VOs in a very live space, so it sounds exactly like you’ve recorded everything in someone’s bedroom. Record as direct and as dry as you can and add EQ and reverb later to spatialize. If need be, record with a quilt over your head… seriously.

this animation is pretty terrible, it was a student project I did, but I think the sound is reasonable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mddckAdWcuE

Thank you :smiley:

All that is exactly the answers i was looking for xD

A quilt over my head for recording voices… I definitely wanna try that and see how different it sounds xD