the next sound you hear

Sounds, music, dialogue, the talky part of talkies. That's the part that's killing me.

When I started doing this cartoon thing I really hadn't considered the sound half of the whole deal. I was pretty much focused on the images. Making drawings move was really all I was thinking about. And no matter what anybody tells you animation is time consuming and labor intensive work. Especially for somebody like me. I'm strictly a hobbyist. I'm not trained and I have no thoughts of getting hired as an animator or anything like that. I'm all trial and error and discovery. I really am making this up as I go.

You can see how halfassed I worked out the audio on my early attempts. I'd taken some needle drop music from old drive-in theater ads and a gunshot recording from the freesound archive and edited it together in Sony Vegas. Finding all that to be a pain in the ass I've pretty much just grabbed an old song off of the Free Music Archive and slapped it up behind the animation. Which worked for what I was doing. But let's face it, I need to learn how to do this audio stuff if I'm gonna get anywhere.

There was my first real attempt at doing lip sync. A track from Monster Zero with Astronaut Glenn and The Controller of Planet X. Parts of it I really like. I had fun animating Nick Adams flipping out, and it looks pretty good. But the Controller, well, he didn't sync as well as Nick. Not really happy with that. But it was my first attempt. Here's hoping I get better.

And let me tell you, I am not a voice actor. Sitting in front of the computer trying my best to record lines, and I'm not very good. But there's nobody else to do it, and to be really honest I have no idea how I'd go about it if there was somebody else who could record lines for me. Maybe I should ask Brett.