Meinart Animation

🔥 HOT interview - Manuel Velázquez, sound designer & composer

At Meinart, Manuel has been the main composer and sound creator behind all of our biggest animated films for many years. His work helps shape the emotion, atmosphere, and rhythm of every story we create.

We asked him a few questions.

1. How does sound design for animated films differ from live-action?

Animation is usually a "cleaner canvas" than live-action in terms of sound. Live-action sound is typically recorded on location (and has to be cleaned and prepared afterward), so there's a first layer of sound that comes from the filming itself, and it's usually the first thing to engage with. Animation has either only dialogue (which is often recorded before animating) and voice-over, or nothing at all. Meinart's short films, which I have worked on, have no dialogue, which means they have been completely blank sound canvases to work on. To this we can add the idea that animation's greatest resource is imagination, since there are no limitations of "what can and can't be filmed." This means that creating sound for animation is often a degree or two further toward "creating a sound world" for the film, and that often the visual world accompanying the sound is partially or totally imaginary. This comes with the added difficulty (in a very creative and fun way) of needing to imagine "unreal" sounds before trying to create them, the unintelligible voices full of effects of the workers in “Ten” might be a nice example of this. In our collaboration, where I have done both sound design and music composition (which is uncommon) working on both disciplines has allowed me to create very intricate universes in which the limits of music and sound design blur: sound design becomes musical, and music also takes on tasks that often fall to sound design. I think this has helped create fuller, richer sound universes for the films.

2. What matters most to you in film sound and why?

It very much depends (or rather, the answer is very much open) so I'll try to answer it this way: I try to see each individual film as its own universe. Each film has specific aesthetics and a specific use of narrative, animation, or film-language style that makes it unique. The most important thing in sound is to adapt to what each film "requires" from sound (we could say the same of music): its ability to be a convincing part of the universe it is helping to portray, and its capacity to blend in with all the other elements in the narrative and the dramaturgy. This always means different specific things when working on different films. So no single ability or approach to sound is the most important one in a general sense or, put differently, the most important thing in sound is to stay flexible in your work, so you can adapt to what a film might need. For example, in "Deadline" I would say one of the most important things was for the sound to adapt to the very cool (but very fast) movements in the animation, and to really blend in with this specific animation style. That's something I haven't even had to think about in other films with different animation styles.

3. Can silence sometimes be more powerful than music?

It can, but in my experience and in my view, it depends more on the context of the situation than on its being silence or music itself. Total silence doesn't really exist, there is no total silence in the sense that there is total darkness. If nothing sounds externally, then we can hear our own bodies, and it's impossible to "shut down" our ears. This means silence is contextual: we call a soundscape silence when it has too few elements, or very quiet ones. But what silence means in a given moment depends on what came before. If four people were shouting in a room and suddenly stopped, then the sound of the fridge would be silence. But if you were reading alone in the kitchen with a humming fridge and it suddenly stopped, the same fridge sound that had been silence would become the annoying noise and a different silence would emerge when it finally stopped. I think the real power comes from this understanding. It means that in working with music there are no sound/silence "recipes," and what is powerful is the ability to see (or hear) and manipulate the overall context of the music piece or so that its effect is the one the creator is looking for.

4. What is the most creative part of building sound for animation?

I talked earlier about how animation comes from imagination, and about its relationship to the materiality of the specific technique the animation is being constructed from. I would apply the same idea to sound. Working with these kinds of mediums involves developing a sense of imagination (even of things we have never done or approached before) and as one gets more experienced in the field, these exercises of imagination (which get translated into exercises of experimentation) become more and more successful, in the sense that what was imagined becomes real. The idea of "I would like this type of sound to deliver this type of sensation, and I will achieve it this way" actually does work, from conceptualization to final form. In Ten, for the scenes in the "universe," we layered around thirty or forty guitars playing very tiny sounds with a lot of delay and effects to create this sense of the vastness of space (this is best experienced in 5.1, but it can be heard in stereo too). In the final mix, it sounds like a delicate single synth, but the little intricate movements between all the guitars are quite powerful—even if not consciously perceived as such.I

5. In your opinion, what matters most in a scene - music, sound effects, or voice?

As in my answer to your second question, it very much depends. To feel verisimilar and to really be expressive, different scenes need different approaches, and what makes one scene work very well could destroy another. For Perfect Fit we really worked on the voices and reactions of the characters, and we aimed for much of the film's emotion to be conveyed through the shouting, crying, and grunting. I think the result is very engaging, and that the characters feel truly alive because of it. But that doesn't mean it would work on "any" film. This same approach might make other kinds of scenes (with different stories, techniques, characters, and universes) work badly, or feel unbelievable or less engaging. Because of this, again, I would say that the most important ability for someone doing this work is the capacity to really read the context of a film, more than any specific compositional or sound-creating skill (though those are very helpful too).

Photos by Ilme Vyšniauskaitė.

🔥 HOT interview - Ainis Karpavičius, interactive animator

Animation in advertising follows completely different rules than animation in films.

For more than 15 years, Ainis has worked on thousands of animated banners, interactive projects, games, and film-related content - learning how to catch attention in just a few seconds.

We asked him a few questions.

1. What makes animation work differently in banners compared to animated films?

An animated banner is basically a one or two-frame message that hits you unexpectedly, when you’re not even prepared to watch anything in the first place. Most of the time the viewer isn’t in “watching mode” at all, so your job is to catch their attention instantly and make them realize the message is actually meant for them. That’s why banner animation often relies on stronger, more aggressive motion and really precise timing.

And banners in general are heavily limited by technical restrictions, so it’s always a challenge to fit all the information, design, and style into one tiny space.

2. How has banner design changed over the last 15 years?

Back in the day banners were just pure chaos - blink blink boom, tons of stuff happening everywhere, a million different styles, crazy interactions. You’d animate things just because it was fun. Even if there were technical limitations, people somehow still found ways around them, so creatively you could pretty much throw anything into a banner - video interactions, mini games, whatever you wanted.

Those banners also took way longer to make. Nowadays, if you really push yourself, you can build an entire banner campaign with all formats in a single day. Back then you could easily spend a couple of weeks on one.

But around 2015, when everything moved from Flash to HTML5, things changed completely. Suddenly there were strict limitations, and a lot of effects became harder to pull off. Since then, banners have become much simpler overall, partly because of the technology, but also because people’s attention spans and browsing habits changed a lot.

3. What is the biggest mistake brands make in digital advertising?

Probably the biggest mistake brands make is putting too many messages into one banner. Especially nowadays, when users are experienced internet browsers and scroll through things insanely fast. Your banner might only get one second of attention, so if you’re trying to show 3–5 different frames and messages, there’s basically no chance the user will actually process any of it.

4. What makes interactive content actually engaging?

With interactive content, people want some kind of result or reward. The content itself has to be interesting, engaging, and make you curious. If the user gets confused or doesn’t immediately understand what’s going on or what they’re supposed to do, then the interactive part has already failed.

Sometimes you actually need a bit of simplicity. Instead of building some complicated mini game, a simple hover effect can be enough if it’s done right.

5. After working on thousands of banners and animated projects, what still excites you creatively?

I still get excited to see what kind of challenge the next project will bring. Agencies aren’t as wild with ideas as they used to be, but from time to time something fun still shows up.

And since HTML5 has pretty strict limitations, it’s always satisfying to somehow squeeze in things that technically shouldn’t even fit - compressing impossible amounts of KB into a tiny file size, while still making the animation feel smooth, well timed, and polished.