A Tale In The Sting: Sound Effects and Ambient Music

After the final piece of animation has been done, post-production enters stage right. As the final step in producing a piece, this is one of my personal favorite procedures since this is where an animator gets to see his/her piece blossom by adding the spirit to the movement - sound effects and ambient music. With the animation already optimized at 30 seconds, composition was not an issue I was supposed to handle. For the background music I chose an ambient piece from freesound.org and blended it with a drone tibetian throat singing choir, played only during the creatures' presence to overtone their omnipotence. Although not noticeable, the choir is heard coherently only when attention is paid to it, otherwise it serves as a filler. As for the sound effects, I positioned them based on frame exposure so that they sync perfectly as without synchronization the illusion of professionality will be lost. Having said that, although I had to meticulously align the sounds, I had to put the titles to finalize the title sequence - it is what makes it a title sequence. The only self-crafted sounds were the voices of Vladimir and Estragon which are just miscellaneous iterations and Estragon's opening line "nothing to do here". Due to my planned-out angles of the camera whilst animating, there was enough space around the shot to effectively position the text in correspondence to the conventions of the rule of thirds. I tried to make the whole sequence appear as a take on an obscure indie-style movie adaptation of Waiting for Godot, and I do believe (after our lectures on type faces and fonts and their tone) that with the font I used I mimicked the atmosphere of noire French existentialist movies - amateur ones, which adds to the aesthetic. As for the names, I used friends' names (with their permission) as mock actors instead of actual actors' names - adds to the indie aesthetic. Initially, I tried introducing the titles without fade-in and fade-out, but found out that that broke the flow of the animation making it seem less like a title sequence, which purged me into adding fade effects to both the text and the animation
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