DarkSquidge (Guess the voice)
Hey you! My name is Thomas Tomska Rid- What are you wearing? ARGH!!
Hey you! My name is Thomas TomSka Ridgewell and welcome back to Thanksdays. The series
where I introduce you to the people who aren’t me. All seven billion of them - well no - just
the ones involved in making my videos - so it’s probably more like a hundred. Anyway
today we’re going talk about sound!
Now in my opinion, when it comes to the things we watch, sound is much more important than
the visuals. Our ears are quicker to be offended than our eyes. We’ll happily put up with
a low quality footage or animation as long as it doesn’t sound like garbage. Because
no matter how cool your cartoon, your movie, or even your song is, if it sounds terrible…
We’re outta here.
Hell, the first time I ever made contact with Freddie Wong was to tell him he should probably
put more effort into the audio on his videos. He didn’t like that. I have opinions and
make friends good!
So, we’ll begin with the people who help to record the sound in the first place: the
boom mic operators / sound recordist, mixer, people. My earliest videos used built-in camera
microphones but eventually we started using these things and they’d be held by whichever
friend wasn’t currently in front of the camera was made to hold one of these. I totally
didn’t force them to do it or anything.
Eventually the need for professional microphone-men grew and I started working with folks like
Alex Odam, Hayden Hillier-Smith, Matt Amys, Ollie Drummond and a bunch more to actually
help us record sound good. I thank them for their service and incredibly resilient arm muscles.
Grrr! This is what holding a microphone looks like.
But recording the sound is only the first part of this journey. Once you’ve got some
audio it needs to be mixed and improved and sometimes replaced and that’s where sound
design comes in! For my first few years of YouTubin’ I used to do lots of very amateurish
sound design using Audacity, Garageband, and Final Cut. It wasn’t great but it got the job done.
[Zanta 3, WAR, Holy Shit Cats]
In fact I still do mostly all the sound design for the asdfmovies.
[asdfmovie5]
But that was all until one night in 2011 when I received a message from the irreplaceable
Mr Dan Middle-Name Pugsley. The message essentially read: “Hey Tom, I like your videos but your
sound design is garbage. You should hire me”… So, when I was done crying, I did.
Dan has done the sound design for pretty much every single one of my videos for the past
4 years; what that entails however I shall let him explain… Elliot go to Dan’s house.
GO TO DANS HOUSE!!
[Elliot goes to Dan's house]
Hello, i'm Dan Pugsley. I'm a sound designer and this is my crib. [Sexy Music]
That's it. [Sexy Music] Close the door. [Dog barks]
Sound design for YouTube consists of tidying up the dialog tracks, recording foley, adding
ambiences and any additional sound effects. I then balance all of these elements against
each other along with the music to create the final mix.
Dan is awesome and definitely one of my top five workaholics. If you need a sound designer
- and also have money - you should totally hire him. Links in the description.
Dan thank you for being by my side for so many years and helping me take my work to
the next level. I hope we get to make lots more things together and I can still afford
you when this all goes horribly wrong.
Finally I need to thank a man whose hours of sound design work you straight-up never
hear. That man would be Elliot, my editor, and also the person hiding behind this camera.
Animators need sound to animate to but a sound designer needs an animation to design the
sound around so… What do we do?
Well, after we record the dialogue for an animation Elliot will take the dialogue, put
it into a timeline, and then build a temporary soundscape with my direction for the animator
to work to. It gives me that little extra control over the pacing of the cartoon and
means we have to spend less time explaining exactly what’s happening at every moment.
[PowerEdd Sound Design Example]
When the animation is completed everything gets deleted except the dialogue which is
given to Dan along with the completed cartoon for final sound design. Elliot is the unheard
hero of Crash Zoom, Eddsworld, and more. To Elliot!
Alright! I hope that gives you a little insight into the world of sound and concludes the
audio related parts of Thanksday. You can check out the music one here. I hope you found
it interesting and now appreciate these people and what they do just a little bit more.
Thank you again to my team and let me know which of the following Thanksdays you’d
like to see next! TomSka out.