IOL Week 3 - Animate a Sound

Experiment 1:

Work with simple lines & scribbles only.

Aim:

To visualise the sound of the traffic lights through a line that flows to the beat of the beeping.

Rationale:

I wanted to explore straight-ahead animation in Toon Boom and how the movement of the line could represent the beat of the lights by changing direction and speed at key points of the audio clip.

Method:

I used a single pink brush line in Toon Boom and created a straight-ahead animation in one drawing node.

Outcome:

I found it hard to keep the line’s movements in sync with the audio clip as I became engrossed in adding more frames. This could be made easier in the future with some planning steps, but I was happy to work without too much planning for this first exercise.

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Experiment 2:

Work with simple shapes only.

Aim:

To visualise the beeping of the traffic lights by dotting spheres on the screen to the beat of the lights.

Rationale:

I wanted to show more of the chaotic repetition of the beeping by having erratic spheres popping up all over the screen.

Method:

I used a repeated dot shrinking animation on two layers and moved them across the screen in varying locations, and raised an aqua bar up the bottom of the screen while rotating it to give a sloping effect.

Outcome:

Moving the pink spheres around the screen randomly got boring after a while and I started to have them move in a recognisable pattern towards the end before breaking apart again. The aqua bar helps to draw attention the the revving of the car in the background, something that I hadn’t paid much attention to in the first exercise.

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Experiment 3:

Work with a combination of lines and shapes.

Aim:

To visualise the beeping of the tragic light with a jittery line and fading dots.

Rationale:

I wanted to play with abstraction with deformers.

Method:

I created a textured line and added a simple 3-point deformer, moving it to the longer beat of the traffic lights, while fading in and out an orange dot to the shorter, lesser heard beat.

Outcome:

The orange dots work exceptionally to distinguish the subtle beeping, as I hadn’t even realised they were in the audio clip until halfway through the third experiment. The purple deformer definitely moves to the more repetitive beeping, but I feel that the jittering could have been more fluid and less randomised. To do this, I could have thought more towards arcs and follow-through in the animation of the reformers.

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Reflection :

As I already had a strong understanding of Toon Boom Harmony, I decided to play with some aspects I hadn’t investigated in Harmony yet, i.e. frame by frame animation  and textured brushes. Something that made me feel pressured at the beginning of the task was the tempo of the beeping, as the beeps were very short and spaced close together. I started off feeling like I had to animate a lot very quickly and I started to feel burnt out after the Experiment 1.

After taking a break I decided that I hated my first attempt at Exercise 1 and set about a second version simply using a moving line and straight ahead animation. While the end result works better than my first version, I could have synced up the movements a bit nicer with the audio clip. Interestingly the longer I listened to the audio clip, the more layers of audio I was able to decipher and thus incorporate into each successive experiment. 

How might sound influence aspects of movement in your project?

As I usually work with animation before audio implementation, I’m often forcing the audio to fit the animation, with minor adjustments to made to sync animation. By having audio established at the beginning, I had to think harder about whether I was working straight ahead or pose-to-pose. In the end, I jumped between the two more fluidly as a case-by-case approach rather than being able to stick to one or the other decisively. I think that having pre-recorded audio for some of my pencil tests will challenge me to animate in a similar fashion, preventing me from focusing solely on pose-to-pose animation.

How might movement influence any sound design for the work?

I think that the movement of my pencil tests should be used to highlight elements of any included audio elements, such as vocal cues in dialogue or other subtleties similar to those noted in this week’s experiments. Through doing this I can create a stronger marriage between audio and visual elements and provide a greater appreciation for the audio, rather than treating it like an afterthought.