OUAN405 - Visual Language: Responding to Sound 3

OUAN404 - Analysing Sound:

Following on from synesthesia, I looked at how some other practitioners animated sound. As a whole, I understood from being a child that visualising sound played a huge part in the way I watched cartoons and read comics. The stereotypical "boom" and "bang" onomatopoeias were shown as large, spiky, fire-coloured star-bubble-things! Speed lines and little clouds of dust depicted the sharp, high-pitched sound of a character running at great speed suddenly from being in a static position. I understood a lot about stereotypical sound animation, but not how other, more experimental animators showed sound.

I looked at Kevin Franz on YouTube, an experimental animator whose short animation often left you thinking "what?" and questioning why on Earth he chose to do such things in his shorts. The work I looked at was "The Sound of Animation" and "The Sound of Animation 2". Although I found them to good little pieces of 3D animation featuring little black balls with stripes on them turning into all sorts of weird shapes to different sounds, I felt that they weren't exactly what I was looking for. They were too perfect and not surreal and experimentational enough for my liking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UrVzFYAbjU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDN5latsqzY