Our Top 5 Tips: Designing Sound & Voice Overs for Animation
Sound design is a crucial aspect when producing animated video. In fact, it’s right up there with the visuals.
Whether we’re talking about the music score behind your action, ambient noise or dialogue, sound design is an integral tool for communicating your message.
Designing Sound for Animation
So what is sound design, exactly?
You can think of it as one of many tools used to tell a story. Sound is used to create atmosphere, but also to amplify meaning and motion on the screen.
There are five basic elements of sound design:
Ambiance: essentially the background sound, ambiance is a subtle immersive cue to help draw viewers into location (e.g. – a cityscape might have ambient sounds of cars and transport, people walking or talking, birds etc.)
Foley Sounds: similar to ambiance, but instead of focusing on subtle background noises it covers things like the footsteps of a character walking in the foreground of the screen, the sound of nails tapping impatiently on a table, the swish of clothing as someone sits down.
Audio Effects or Sound Effects (SFX): these are sound effects that don’t occur naturally in the real world, for example an intergalactic space battle, or even the dramatic pow of a punch to the face that we don’t actually hear in reality.
Music: the score of the animation – this is any music played in the background, often used for mood and to cue emotional responses from viewers.
Voice Over / Voice Acting: this is the narrator’s voice over on an advertisement, the sound of characters chatting to each other – any dialogue that requires a human voice to communicate.
Animation Voice Over Scripts
A big part of sound design is the use of the human voice. Although a voice over is just a narrated track added to your animated video, it can make a huge difference to the completed piece.
It’s a direct and engaging way to impart information in a simple and easy-to-absorb way. It gives your video an element of credibility and humanises your brand, as the tone of voice, accent and timing will give your animation personality and a human element for your audience to connect with.
For branding, it’s a great way to add a gentle and persuasive call to action. A human voice that generates connection and trust can increase engagement and brand interaction.
Animation Voice Over Software
There are many apps and programs to streamline and support the creation of voice over for animated video.
This begins with hardware, like mics and pop filters, and extends to the programs used for recording and editing … and even apps that use a combination of text-to-speech engines to create human-like voice overs.
Sound design can be highly subjective, especially in relation to the more emotional elements (music or voice over, for example, which are designed to elicit certain feelings from your viewers). So, the more honed a brief is, the more streamlined the process will be.
Here are our top 5 tips to consider when creating your sound design brief.
Tip 1: Identify Your Target Audience
Identifying who your animation is targeting is absolutely integral to creating a piece that will resonate and connect with the right people.
This will inform the tonality of any sounds or voice overs you use. Things like language, emotional energy, diction etc will be directly related to who the video is created for.
Tip 2: Establish Your Genre
As with target audience, understanding the genre of the animation will inform much of its soundscape.
Will the animation have a comedic feel? Is it emotive and sad? The sounds textures and voice overs will be vastly different depending on the genre (even if the scripts are the same!), and this is an extremely important part of each animation.
Tip 3: Style and Tone
Whether the animation is being created to sell something, inform, or tell an emotional story, its style and tone will play a role in sound design.
Think of it like the audio branding.
Is the animation cool, corporate and informative? Is it exciting, bouncy and fun? The style of the animation should be intimately linked with the style of voice acting and sound design in order to create a seamless video.
Tip 4: Emotion
Sound plays such a huge role in eliciting emotion; some would even argue more so than the actual visuals. In this sense, understanding the emotional role of the animation is one of the most important things to establish before starting on any project.
If in doubt, it’s a great idea to discuss it with your production team – it’s what they do for a day job, after all!
Tip 5: Video Objective
Understanding the objective of your animation is vital when creating voice overs and sound effects.
If, for example, the animation is an informative manual for the use of a particular product, the tone and diction of voice over will be very different to an animation created to promote the launch of a new product.
The former will likely be clear, concise, easy to understand with precise diction and soothing voice tone. The latter may be laced with excitement or intrigue, and emotional output will be more important to create atmosphere and interest.
Need help with sound design and voice overs for animation? The Lumeo production team has decades of combined sound experience to draw on – reach out and say hello here!
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