Making Progress on My Stop-Motion Animation

I am so close to being done with my stop-motion animation! In the beginning I had such basic drawings and now I have a piece of production that I think looks pretty cool. Of course I had a couple setbacks like not knowing how to light any shot, accidentally making my project 4K (literally have no idea how I did that), and struggling to hide the paint marks on the bottle cap. A number of people helped me solve each of these problems as they came up (thank you Arturo!) and now I have this:

Ta-da! I'm still working on the sound design and the LMFAO song that's in there right now is more of a placeholder than anything. I'm hoping to get an original track from a friend to swap in for it. Let me know what you think.

Hayao Miyazaki and My Neighbor Totoro

A lot of my friends have been telling me to check out Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli’s films for a while, and this week I finally did. When I was younger I had seen Howl’s Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke, but it was so long ago that I definitely don’t remember either of them. This week I watched My Neighbor Totoro and I absolutely loved it. It had an engaging, heartwarming story that I was very invested in and characters that are easy to sympathize with. Those were probably the biggest reasons that I liked the movie, but one thing that did stand out to me at certain times was the sounds design. Sound is something that can really make or break a movie/video, and especially an animation. In this case, the sound design definitely added to the film. Good sound design is something that is going to be very key in my name project - it could either make the final product cool and believable, or cheesy and lame. I’m really hoping for the former.

Sound Design and Thieves

      Once again, I've found myself wasting my precious life watching YouTube, spending each minute of my day with something that could easily have genuinely positive impact on my life. Yet, here we are. I was sent this animated short film by a very close friend of mine and I found myself in tangible awe.
       My favourite part is easily the sound design; it really brings the viewer in and smacks you right dab in the middle of the world the film has created. It makes me a very happy viewer to hear things like footsteps or coughs from people besides the main characters. Small things like jingling keys or riffling papers are sometimes forgotten but this film seems to fill in every single nook and cranny that one could visually pick out.

      They do an amazing job with the music in conjunction with the sound effects as well, satisfying every single mood change that the plot has to offer. Speaking of, the plot is also really nice and it offers a nice twist on the classic 'boy must find girl' trope and accurately represents a mental illness. And you know how I'm a sucker for good representation, am I right? The main character is adorable alone; despite the fact he's a little shit and a little criminal, you kind of fall for his little quirks and mistakes and you end up rooting for him in the end. It's cute and it's definitely worth the 11 minutes of your life. Trust me. I've got minutes to spare.

Animation Sound Design

Here's a neat little video about the process of sound designing for animated films.  In this case, the video gives us a behind the scenes look at one of the most popular and well-known animated films from the past few years: WALL-E