When my nephew was nine, he got the book Klutz Lego Make Your Own Movie, which teaches how to do stop-motion animation with Legos. When I saw his first videos, they were so fun I had to add sounds to them (what I do for a job, basically!). With a few simple suggestions, he was off and running doing all his own sound design.
I going to share some of my recommendations for software and where to find sounds, but first, here’s the stop-motion video I added sound to. (It will playback muted if you’d like to see it without sound first.)
Types of Sounds
When you’re building out sound for something that’s starting out silent (like stop-motion animation), there’s two main elements of sounds you can add:
- Backgrounds: These are sounds that help set the move and tell the audience where you are. Are you in a kitchen, underwater, or in a pre-historic jungle? In the Lego dinosaur video, I used jungle and wind blowing through trees as the environment. Backgrounds can be anything from traffic, people talking, crickets, birds, the inside of an airplane.
- Sound effects: These are individual/specific sounds to match something on-screen or to help with storytelling. In Lego dinosaur, I used eggshell cracking, dinosaurs roaring, and walking.
Where to Find Sound Effects
If you’re interested in recording your own sounds, a mobile phone or tablet with a microphone will be fine to get started, or there are many low-cost microphone options. Recording your own sounds is a great way to start learning how to listen, record, edit, and manipulate sound.
Sound designers collect sounds no different than others collecting coins or rocks. In the digital world, the files are stored in a “sound effects library.” It’s exactly how it sounds – sound effect files are cataloged and sorted so you can search by a word or phrase. It’s sort of like a search engine for sound effects.
There are collections of sound effects (also called sound effects libraries) that you can buy, but there are also free libraries if you are using them for educational or personal use. I recommend these:
Searching Libraries
Sometimes you have to get creative searching for sounds, and that’s where this gets fun. Let’s say you want to make the sound of an alien spaceship. We don’t have real recordings of alien ships in space (and technically there is no sound in space), so one route is to search a sound fx library. You might get lucky and find alien or spaceship sounds someone else created that you like.
Or, you could ask yourself, “what else sounds like an alien spaceship?” You could try searching for sounds like “buzz,” “spin,” or “whoosh” and see what you find. Sometimes it takes a combination (called “layering”) to come up with something you like. Maybe some underwater bubbles added to a refrigerator buzz and a weed wacker would work.
With the dinosaurs, I had some decent sounds (for this purpose) in my sound effects library. If I needed more variety or more sounds to layer, I would have searched for words like “roar” and “creature”. I picture little dinosaurs sounding like raspy birds, so I would start my search with crows or parrots.
Tip: Walking Sounds
A real lego doesn’t make sounds when it walks. But, in the entertainment world, you can add sounds, if you want! Common terms in sound effects libraries are “steps” and “footsteps”. There’s a lot of nuance to footsteps, including the type of shoes or the surface (floor) they are on. Are your Legos walking in sneakers, high heels, flip flops, barefoot, or boots? Are they walking on concrete, grass, dirt, hollow wood? The great part about animation is it can be whatever you want it to be!
Effects Processing
A lot of software now has easy tools to manipulate sounds, such as reversing, doing a pitch shift, or other types of “audio processing.” “Reverb” can make a space sound huge, for example. Professionals use a combination of processing and layering to build the sounds of a scene.
Adding Music
If you want to add music to your videos then post online somewhere (including Youtube) “copyright” is a concern. Someone owns every piece of music, and by default (in the United States), that means others have to ask for permission to use it. If you don’t have permission and put someone’s music in your video, your video could be taken down.
There’s a few ways around this. You can search for “royalty-free music.” One site I like is Musopen.org. There are many options for AI music where you can use the music freely. Or, you could make music entirely on your own!
Software to Add Sound to Video
To add sounds to a Lego animation movie (or any stop-motion animation), I would look for video software, not audio software. Most audio software (that’s simple enough for kids to use) is geared towards audio-only uses, such as making music or recording a podcast.
Video software, on the other hand, is designed for these kinds of tasks – adding audio, editing picture, etc. For Mac, I highly recommend iMovie.
Making a Career Out of Sound Design
The people who do this work for a job essentially use the same process as this post. A person who does this for a living is called a “sound designer” or a “sound fx editor.”
A lot of sound designers record their own sounds, too. Ai-Ling Lee, one of the only women ever nominated for an Academy Award for Sound Editing, carries around a small sound recorder with her everywhere. Anytime she hears an interesting sound she records it. These sounds are edited and added to her sound fx library.
Here are a couple videos where my nephew did all the sound himself!