After the end of rendering, it enters the stage of post-color mixing, which is an important link to ensure that the color of the picture is uniform, beautiful, and in line with the mood and theme of the work.
First of all, it is necessary to pay attention to the unity of the overall tone, adjust the exposure, contrast and saturation to highlight the main body and the sense of hierarchy, and clarify the overall mood of the scene. Here, my animation mainly needs warm sunlight, so I will use the warm tone for Zelda’s scene style as my reference screen and color reference standard.
At the same time, the white balance is corrected to avoid color bias. Adjust color tendencies according to the mood of the scene, enhance light and shadow details such as highlights, shadows and light effects, and add stylised effects such as particles and halos if necessary. Ensure that it is done on professional color calibration equipment and compared with the reference work or the original image to ensure that the desired effect is achieved, while selecting the right color space and high-quality output format to preserve detail.
In terms of post-production music and sound effects, since my animation does not include dialogue, I only needed to record some vocalizations and breathing sounds.
Sound effects were selected based on specific scenes. For example, Harlow’s entrance is always accompanied by the sound of bells, inspired by the Tinker Bell movies. For the cat’s appearance, I used a heavy thud sound effect to emphasize the ground-shaking impact.
Regarding background music, the story’s tone shifts between relaxed, exciting, lighthearted, and comedic over a duration of one minute and forty seconds. Finding copyright-free music that perfectly matched was challenging.
I decided to use Suno AI, a music creation platform. My experience with it is similar to using MidJourney for AI-generated images. Suno AI can produce music with or without lyrics and allows for keyword adjustments to extend or modify existing results, making it a powerful AI productivity tool.