10. EDITING & AUDIO

I had worked previously with video editing for promotional purposes, and I realized that the editing process for animation is nothing like what I'd done before. There aren't reams of footage to pick through, no happy accidents to stumble upon, and no natural spontaneity to work with. Everything in animation has to be planned. In a strange way, though, it makes the actual editing process easier because it becomes mostly a matter of matching the audio to the picture; the other decisions you'd be making for other kinds of video editing were already made in the previs process.

One thing that I found very difficult, however, was that I wasn't set on the music I wanted to use. Pretty much as soon as I started making the concept art, I started hunting for the right music. In a film that would have no dialogue, music - and the points when it's deliberately not present - become especially important. And for the longest time, I struggled to find something that would suit the flavor of the visuals; either the examples I found were copyrighted, or they were free sound bites that sounded too synthetic and overly commercialized.

Right when I was close to giving up, I had the incredible good fortune of stumbling across the work of Yusuke Tsutsumi - a Japanese musician with a specialty for gorgeous, ambient, electronic music. He had a sound that was modern and accessible, but that also had plenty of emotion and understated elegance. Miracles do happen after all.

Not only was he very kind and pleasing to work with, he gave me his permission to use two of his songs for my little student film: "Message to the Girl", and "Let it Snow". You owe it to yourself to go to his website and check out his amazing work.




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