Sound Research I

My first lot of sound research i did was looking at similar animations to my 3rd year's project, keeping in mind the genre, story content and target audience.

The bold, graphic style of the animation he did immediately brought Cartoon Network to mind as a lot of their shows have a strong Flash vector style. I then started to reminisce about the cartoons i used to watch as a child and remember which cartoons were similar to the one i'm currently working on.

In particular, Dragon Ball-Z, Samurai Jack and Avatar the Last Airbender sprang to mind. I've decided to watch some clips of these animations and pay special attention to the sound effects and music they've used and what made them so effective.

Samurai Jack holds a continuous oriental music theme throughout, and when changing the mood of the story, the pacing of the music changes, faster for action, quiet and eerie for suspense and slower for a more comfortable and relaxed feeling. All the sound effects are more exaggerated to make it more exciting for the young target audience. What i found interesting, was that the music did most of the story telling in this particularly from 05:36 onwards.

I really wanted to put up an example of Avatar the Last Airbender up, but it looks like Youtube is alot more vigilant with getting rid of illegal copies of it. So, you'll have to justsettle for a megaupload link: http://www.megavideo.com/?v=50GZ6MUZ

Avatar has more of an epic feel to it's soundtrack, with the odd slapstick humour sound effects to lighten the mood. Again, all the sound effects are slightly exaggerated but not as much as Samurai Jack's.

This clip of Dragon Ball-Z shows a bit of combat, this programme used sounds typical for any anime, really over the top (to match the exaggerated expressions) and usually not very natural sounding noises either. This was to get a taste of any sounds i might need for any combat scenes in James' animation.