Adding sound to my animation

 I have mentioned before that I was planning on adding sound (music) to my animation. In the first term I did a research about different types of copyright licenses to make sure I was not using music illegally. Click here to access that post. In the first term I used music from bensound.com, a website that has a bunch of songs free to download. They are all on a CC license with attribution, which means I needs to give credits to the artist, for example in the credits at the end of my animation. 

First I needed two different sounds, one for the beginning and ending with the note writing, I wanted the sound of someone writing on paper and the other sound I wanted was the sound of taking a picture. I decided not to look online for the sound of writing because it could take hours, so I decided to create the sound myself. 

I made the sound by drawing with a pencil on paper and recorded it with a voice memo app on my phone. I made the sound louder in IMovie and it worked perfectly. 

I also decided to record the sound of taking a picture. I decided to turn on screen recording on my phone, go to camera, take a picture and then convert the mp4 file to mp3. 

As a converting tool I used the CloudConvert website that is accessible online for free. There I switched my video to a sound file which then I could easily put in my IMovie file with the rest of the sounds and my animation. 

Next I had to look for music that I would want for my animation. I chose 3 instrumental songs from bensound.com that I decided to use. I downloaded them and made sure to credit the author at the end of my animation. I uploaded them to IMovie and placed the songs how I wanted them. 

This process took a while, and when I thought everything was good and rewatched my animation, I saw a mistake in the animation itself. I had to go back to OpenToonz and make changes there. I was a little bit frustrated that I did not check it earlier, but I am glad I have found it before exporting. This taught me a lesson to always made sure everything is okay before I go from one software to another. I did not do that here and it caused me a lot of extra work which I could have avoided. 

After a lot of work, the animation was fully complete. I think I did a really good job considering a time frame I had. If I had a little bit more time I would probably try to fix all the rough edges and would make the story a little bit more complex. I think I have planned my work well with the animation and I am glad I left myself some time to work on the 3D model which is still unfinished. 

Here is the animation: