Recording sound

The next step, having researched what sounds you're going to need, having found the people/items that are going to produce this and knowing what equipment you're going to use is to actually record your sounds. As with most thing in animation, there are a number of ways in which this can be done. For smaller companies who probably have a limited budget, time constraints and a small crew, it's not viable to record every sound necessary, for these sorts of companies there are websites such as http://www.freesound.org/browse/ as well as others that require small payments. These websites allow people to download hundreds of different sound samples that they can use in their videos. Naturally there are royalty fees and trademark issues involved in using music downloaded straight from iTunes or via other websites, so it's important that these companies can find both music and sounds from websites such as this. For those who are gifted slightly more time and slightly higher budgets there are a number of other ways that they can get and record sound. Music can be produced by other companies such as Circa music (http://circamusic.com/ a company I previously mentioned in my motion graphics blog) who will produce taylor made music for the animation that you intend to make. There is of course the extremely high end side to animation, where companies like Disney and pixar can have scores and soundtracks produced for them by artists, orchestra's etc ...  It's important to experiment and play about with sound at this time to get a feel for what you really want, the same way that you develop the visuals in the concept art stage of the animation, it's now important to develop the ambience and feel of the piece. A great example, although not in animation, was Hans Zimmer attempting to get the right feel for the music that should embody the Joker in The Dark Night.

It's this level of depth and intuitiveness that gives a truly great piece a truly great soundtrack, whilst it may be in the background and often very subtle, a powerful and recognisable soundtrack can add levels upon levels of depth to a film or animation