Why You Should Spend Money on Sound Design
It can sound weird for people who are ”outside” the Motion Graphics field to hear us talking about it. But the truth is most people on this area, especially when they are beginning or are a freelancer, opt for not hiring a Sound Designer and do all the work by themselves. We believe each professional should experience all parts of the process at least one time, to be able to delegate and direct others. Doing all by yourself at the beginning sounds like a common habit but it serves only as an experience and not a way of live the professional life.
You can probably be at that part of the project when you’re willing to hire a Sound Designer but still looking for ”a reason” to not do it all be yourself. Like we do in most of our posts, we want to present you the benefits of it and what you’re losing in not having a professional working with you.
To start, let me tell you a story you should probably identify with.
I started to do freelance work at the college. I also worked with a small Film Production company in the advertising field, as the only animation professional there. It can sound as different things, but both the beginning of my freelance work and the day job I had were very similar. They all had Advertising Agencies as the main clients and I had to rush all the time to met unbelievable deadlines. In the end, my job wasn’t only developing Motion Graphics projects, but also to add Sound Effects to it. As an employee, you don’t have many options, but as a freelancer I was taking the wrong decisions. I started to reflect the whys behind my decision of doing it all by myself, and the lack of a developed mindset was what tricked me.
There are two main reasons why I didn’t hire a Sound Designer professional by that time:
- The ”I can do it easy” thinking;
- The ”I don’t have money” or ”The project’s budget is low” excuse.
What a fool I was…
I wasn’t understanding the value and the importance of it and it costed me time, effort and quality in my projects.
If you think like I did, I hope this blog post could change your mindset around that topic and you start seeing the benefits of it in your projects. The excuses I gave are common to most professionals and I’ll show you why I was terrific wrong.
I thought it was easy and at first it was. Not because I’m a master on it, or I think everyone can do it, but because my standards weren’t soo elevate. I added some stock sound in a place and another and that was good for me, I thought I was doing the whole Sound Designer work. But once you understand what those professionals do, you begin to see the importance of it and to understand the quality of a well-done job.
The Sound Designer work is more than add some Swishes and Swoosh at certain moments of an animation. It’s more than search the whole internet for stock sound effects and throw them in the video. Like every designer, the Sound Designer professional think, plan, research, and create. They study what’s the best sound to give life to an animation, identify how that effect should look like and how they will create it. Yes, they create those sounds.
Sound Designers are not expensive libraries of stock sound effects, they are creatives that bring live to videos/animation crafting unique sounds.
If you experienced search the internet for a specific sound and didn’t found anything good enough, you will understand what I’m talking about. The Sound Designer creates his own sounds. In order to simulate a specific sound for the moment, they sometimes recreate the action — like footsteps, someone drinking from a straw — or even uses different types of equipment and objects to achieve the sound needed. In very common cases, they even use their mouths to produce certain sounds.
Some sounds aren’t something natural and most of the time the Sound Designer need to think how to generate a sound that may not be accurate to the ”real life”, but would be the best to emphasize and highlight the action.
But not only having the idea that it was an easy task, at first I was like most Motion Designers that say they don’t have money to hire a professional. This is a lack of planning during the negotiation phase. As any other professional, the Sound Designer has its value in a project, and you should have a separate budget for that.
What I found that completely changed my mind about investing on it, and also investing on having other people working with me during a project, was like a surprise for me. Instead of losing money I was gaining more money by investing on that. I’m not being tricky here, it’s really the truth.
Investing on Sound Design increased the quality of my work, what allowed me to get more clients and raise my rates.
Let’s analyze it. When I invested money on a Sound Designer professional I received something even more precious than quality sound — I received time. All the time and effort spent searching for sound libraries, using specific softwares and trying to make everything sounds good, is now used on what I do best: animation. Letting a professional to handle this specific task allowed me to spend more time animating my projects and enhance not only the sound but also the animation quality of my work.
The result by the time I changed my mind was obvious. It was before Rafael and I joined forces to build MOWE. At MOWE, we are opening to have other professionals summing up with the team to help us on projects. This way we can achieve a high-quality standard in all the senses.
Sound Design is important like every other step of an Animation process. Having a professional partner working with you will only help you to achieve an even higher level of your work. Focus on what you do the best and delegate work for those who are the Master’s at their areas.
Originally published at mowestudio.com on November 4, 2015.
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