See Hear part 1

I knew that we would be animating to sound for this project so in preparation I made a small animated sequence to piece of music I liked, just to get a feel for what its like to animate to sound.

For this project we had to make our own sound composition. There were 2 separate groups, one would record inside and the other outside. We were all delighted to hear that our group had the wonderful opportunity of recording outside!!!!!
Once wed gotten over our chillyness we started to record almost every sound we could find. We decided that we wanted to focus on rhythms and beats when looking for our sounds. We also tried to record peoples conversations to use in our sound but in the end we decided they didn't quite work so we left that out.

We took our recorded sounds and proceeded to edit them in Audition. We found that we had alot of really good beats and cut them up together to try and make an interesting composition. It took a while and lot of messing about to find different things that worked but eventually we managed to create our 2 minute piece. We had different transitions every 30 seconds so that each member of our group could easily animate each section. What was funny about creating this piece was that we were making it with the idea that our sounds would be given across to the other team and then they would have to animate to it, so we decided to make it a bit shit.........Nah I'm joking, but we were very in tune to what the other team was doing as we thought that was what we were going to be animating, I think we also created sounds with less specific visuals in mind because we didn't think we'd be working on our own piece so it didn't really matter what visuals we had in mind because the other team would probably interpret them differently anyway.

So we then found out that we were in fact animating to our own sounds. This was a bit of relief to be honest because although I said that we didn't necessarily create sounds with specific visuals in mind, its very difficult to make the sound piece and not imagine some sort of visual to it. 

We thought that we should keep our visuals very abstract and possibly to use unexpected visuals that wouldn't normally be associated with these sounds. 

ATORMENTA from Cesarlinga on Vimeo.

Hansel + Gretel from YELLOWSHED on Vimeo.

We decided to go and experiment with things like water and ink and see what we came up with. 

I did some things with food colouring and ink in water. 

These are some of the things that never made it into the final film. We decided that we would keep 2 consistencies, one being that we would have a black background for every shot and the other that everything would be abstract. 

I liked the idea of having images that did not relate to the sound, like the ink for the bell sounds. For the salt scenes I wanted to have a bit of correlation to the previous scene which was very geometric and shape based. i made similar shapes with the salt to make a relation but still stay true to my own style. 

I did most of my work either in photoshop or on the rostrum. I synced up my sound by putting things in frame by frame and then replaying each time to see what should happen next. I'm quite happy with my final piece, I think it syncs up fairly well. I like all of the visuals my team made and think we have a fairly strong piece. 

See Hear Outdoors from ECA Animation on Vimeo.