Welcome back! In the last post I talked a bit about the character design process and rigging of Junebug for Some Days Are Bug Days. In this post, I’m going to talk a bit about the sound design which includes voice, sound effects and music.

I knew I was going to be the one to have to do the voice for Junebug so I bought some recording equipment in order to do so. I already had Adobe Audition, the software used to record, edit and sweeten the sound. Now, I just needed a mic, a pop filter and some good headphones. After quite a bit of research I landed on these: a Yeti USB Microphone by Blue Microphones, a Nady Clamp On Pop Filter and a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-M50x Professional Studio Monitor Headphones.

Usually, if I was going to hire someone to do voice work I’d record it all in one session to be time and cost efficient. But since it was just me doing the voice and there wasn’t much of it, I would record just that particular segment right before animating.

Some of the sound effects I had in place during the animatic phase and some I added in after animating. There’s probably about 20 different sound effects used in this short 2 minute animation. Way back in the day I bought a cd collection (yes, cds) of sound effects. One of the best purchases I’ve made. I’ve used them a lot over the years and on this animation as well. I also found quite a few nice and free sound effects through YouTube’s sound library. The couple of sound effects I didn’t have or couldn’t find for free I was able to buy through audio sites like Pond5.

For the music, I pretty much had an idea from the beginning that I wanted ukulele type of music. There was this local Kansas City band called Victor & Penny that I thought their type of music is what I want. So I found a few songs off of their first album, Antique Pop, and used it as a scratch, temporary, music track. I didn’t think those particular songs would be what I ended up using but they went so well with the animation that they pretty much were. When I approached them to use the music in my short animation they were super generous and I can’t thank them enough. Go check them out, buy their music and catch one of their live shows, they are super fun!

Coming up in the next post on the animation process for Some Days Are Bug Days I’ll talk a bit about animating it. If you have any questions feel free to comment here or send me an email through the contact form on the right.

And Subscribe to my E-List here!