There’s enough things to keep an animator occupied, other than making your drawings come to life. In fact, we can’t play entirely on our own. I found this out first when I realised I needed a voice actor to do his magic before I could go too far with animating.
But then my next hurdle was music.
I can sing a little, in the shower! But I can’t keep a beat and any other understanding of music, simply doesn’t exist. So I was happy when I met Tinus my sound designer from www.tinystudios.nl. This magical and bearded man put his skills to work and created a dimension to my animation, unachievable without.
He not only wrote music and created a soundscape to reflect the mood and actions of the characters, but also created the dark atmosphere needed to bring the ‘dark’ in to the story.
But getting to that point was difficult for him. And that was because of me. For I think in images and not in sound (which he does). So when it came to describing what I wanted it was hard! I felt like a fool! But we got there in the end.
Sound designers are unique talents that can sculpt with sound. Respect!

But my sound problem didn’t end there. I actually went in to panic mode and wasn’t sure what Tinus had made was right for the film. My story is written with a big helping of black humour. And I felt the music had too much dark and was missing the humour.
Thankfully  though, Tinus went on holiday and I went ahead with sound effects and editing the film, with the plan to go back in to the studio when he got back from holiday.
But to my delight, the sound effects created the humour I was missing. Yey! With the combination of dark music, light hearted sound effects and colourful images I found the humour in the dark that I was looking for.
For the sound effects I used 2 websites www.freesfx.co.uk and www.freesound.org and made all the ones I couldn’t find myself, with quick time and Recorder plus, an app for the iPad. Making them was much more fun than searching for them. With the computer my eyes dried out, but while making them I laughed a lot!