Recently a client approached us at Lisnmusic to supply music and sound design for a forthcoming animated advert. The advert was for ‘MTV at the Movies’, a weekday show on MTV reviewing the latest releases, running interviews and lots of other film related bits and pieces. The advert will run in 60 countries worldwide.
Below is a short diary to give an insight to how we approached the project and what is involved with this type of work – it runs through how the brief was interpreted, the stages of production for the audio and how things changed throughout the process.
PHASE 1
The project kicks off with us being supplied with a rough animatic from the animators.
The animatic is a low-resolution version of what the animators are creating. Not much character animation at this stage but all the key timings are there for us to sync up the sound design and identify key moments in the music. We identified four key moments in the animation section of the advert.
For this first draft we decided to only concentrate on the SFX elements. We made a list of all SFX required, then recorded everything where possible and the remaining sounds were sourced from our library. We then moved on to syncing it all, up after which we went to work on getting good continuity across all the sounds. This fix draft is sent over to the client as a WIP (work in progress) to make sure things are heading in the correct direction.
PHASE 2
Once the second animatic comes in we also have the feedback from the client and are ready to crack on.
You can see from the screenshot that the resolution of the video is now much higher and smoother. At this stage we started working on the composition. This particular project required cinematic orchestral at the start and then something more contemporary for the video montage at the end. As mentioned earlier we identified four key moments that should be highlighted in the composition. We created a composition based around this concept, but quickly realised that four changes in such quick succession made the piece far to frantic. Instead, we decided to work towards having a single large event in the composition in the middle (the romance section) and highlighting the other key moments with minimal sound design, so for example car crash, ogre noise, and lightning.
The WIP is then sent across to the client for approval and feedback.
PHASE 3
From this screenshot you can see that the project is now running at 55 channels. The colour coding on the groups defines each section of the production, animation, action, fantasy, romance, horror and montage (which is the last 15 seconds where the voice over occurs).
PHASE 4
Above is the final render of the animation, this is the version that we receive on delivery day and once our WIP has been approved. The remaining work consists of minor re-syncing of sound design to tighten everything up, final mix down of the composition, mastering to -10db and export of the various versions that the client requires. In this case we were required to deliver full mix @ 30sec, full mix @ 15sec, no music mix and no sfx mix in aiff format.
And the final video – seeing all the hard work come to fruition!
MTV at the Movies from Lisn Music on Vimeo.
In total the project took approximately 5 days, spread over a seven day period while we waited for feedback from others involved in the process.
If you’re interested in talking to Lisnmusic about creating bespoke music for your project, please contact us.