Final Edit and Output - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 335

Sound Effects and Foley

Sound effects can add another level of
believability to your animation. In fact, like
music and motion blur, it is something we
don't notice when it's done well, but it will
leave a horrible hole when it's missing.
There are two sources for sound effects
for your animation: prerecorded and
live. The Freesound project ( http://
freesound.iua.upf.edu/ ) is a
massive database of searchable sounds
under a Creative Commons license that
are perfect for use in short animations. Everything from crowd noise to car engines to pots crashing on a
fl oor can be found there and can be easily synced to your animation in the Sequence Editor.
Some sounds, such as the footsteps of a main character, are more easily performed live. The art of creating
sound effects for a video (live action or animated) in real time in front of a microphone is called Foley. The
procedure is to watch the animation, making a list of the sound effects you will need to generate. Then you
fi gure out how to make those sounds. When you have your noise makers assembled, you array them about
you in your recording space, play the animation, and start running around like a madman trying to keep up.
In this way, you can follow along with a character's footsteps exactly by putting on shoes with hard heels and
walking on a wooden fl oor or a piece of plywood. Snap a celery stalk for a breaking bone. Clap your hands for
a slap. The great thing about doing Foley work, besides being fun, is that when you are done, all of your sound
effects are in a single sound strip, already synced to the animation and ready for inclusion in the Sequence Editor.
Of course, you are not constrained by the Foley Artists' Union to do everything in a single pass. Depending on
the complexity of your animation, you may need several passes to record every sound you have noted.
If you do any live recording of your own sound effects and have used anything from the Freesound library, con-
sider breaking your own recordings up into discreet sounds and donating them to Freesound for others to use.

Figure 16.17 Music is added

Output Formats

Way back in Chapter 4, you decided on an aspect ratio and frame rate for your animation, most likely with
your eventual output targets in mind. Blender gives you a bunch of options for creating videos, but only one
lets you output a video with the sound already embedded.
Here are some suggestions for possible distribution channels for your animation and how Blender can help.

The Wrappers

Blender can output to three different video wrapper formats: .AVI, .MOV and .MPEG. Although they
have each evolved from their origins, these three are still associated in some people's minds with Windows
(AVI), Macintosh (MOV), and the Internet (MPEG). In reality, all computer systems have the ability to play