Sound Design: Elephant's Dream

This is a screen shot of one of my sound design projects. It's for a short animated film called "Elephant's Dream". I took a 5 minute piece of the entire short film and stripped all the original sound from it and replaced it with my own sounds. I had about 20 different tracks throughout the entire thing and used almost all of them the entire time. I had about 7 different tracks just for sound effects, 3 tracks for background sounds and ambiance, 2 tracks for music, 2 tracks for dialogue and 6 aux tracks that I used for processing effects. Each aux track had some effects like reverb and delay on them and I used sends and returns to get them on certain tracks at certain times.

The entire project is divided into 4 different scenes. Each scene I had to take into account the way the room sounded and how the sound happening in the room would also sound. I used different timed reverbs and delays to get the sound just  right. In some scenes, the rooms were huge and because I didn't want it to sound too empty or too big the use of ambient noises really came into play during those scenes.

I think the poorest part of the whole project was the voice acting. The reason is because I didn't have time to find good voice actors to portray the characters properly, I ended using some friends and the voices came out really mediocre at best. I do, however, plan on going back and redoing the voices to get them right this time.

Overall, the project came out pretty good. It was fun to do because it allowed me to use my creativity to design some sounds that would make the story make sense.