A COLLABORATIVE POST BY SAM BUSEKRUS
ASSISTANT EDITOR, BOOM BOX POST
Working in animation leaves a lot of room to be creative and see/hear things that you wouldn’t in real life scenario. This week I sat down with sound effects editor, Brad, to see just how he sells a big moment/scene!
Monster Truck Transformation
First I’d like to go through an example before we get to the tips. Brad created a really cool monster truck build that honestly didn’t have that much going on visually, but sound wise… wowza. Brad didn’t design a lot for this transformation, he mainly used realistic elements. His build consisted of: heavy metal gears, a monster truck engine that he previously made, a firetruck horn, synths, power ups/power downs, and monster/animal vocals.
Why did he use the scary vocals? Brad felt that it was missing something once he added all of the realistic elements to the monster truck. He wanted to get creative with it and go outside of the box. He added monster vocals to the car engine and rhino vocals underneath the firetruck horn. It really made it feel fuller and more scary.
Another important point to this is that power ups/power downs are VERY important for big machinery.
Tips for making it OVER the top
Do something fun with it. Everyone can say that they fall into just going by the picture and following the notes, but don’t just cut to cut! Get creative and enjoy it.
Root it in reality- humans relate to things that they experience in real life. In this example it’s a car. If you root in reality, it allows yourself to break the rules. Just like Brad did by adding those monster and animal vocals. Obviously a real car doesn’t have scary vocals.
It is important to make individual moments stand out. That is what is going to make it fun and exciting but also it is important that those moments flow together for the bigger picture.
How you cut and how you sell it depends on your audience. If you have an audience for young kids, you can get crazier with it because they think everything will just sound cool.