A Look Into Crash Course's Sound Design (Patreon)

You may have never thought much about it, but Crash Course videos have a bunch of sound effects to accompany the animations. Sound designer Tuna Metesh tells us how he makes those sounds:

Hey! My name is Tuna, and I’m the in-house Sound Designer for Complexly. I’ve been doing sound design for about 10 years, and in the last year I’ve been lucky enough to get to work on several Crash Course series. We thought it might be fun this month to give you a look behind the curtain to see what goes into adding a sparkle to Thought Cafe’s wonderful animations.

I start by making a list of all the cues that will be needed. For Crash Course, this includes the vocabulary terms entering and exiting the bottom of the screen, the side animations opening and closing, full screen transitions, text writing sounds, and whatever other sounds recur. I work with the preview episode as well as a lookbook design document that Thought Cafe creates for each series to build this initial list:

Once the list is created, I start gathering sounds that help me realize the aesthetic the director and I settled on. For CC Geography, we decided to go with a very papery, map-sound aesthetic, so I gathered some materials from around my apartment:

I recorded myself handling playing cards, using a fountain pen to write in a field notebook, typing on a typewriter, and rolling up this ALF poster my cousin gave me. Fun fact: every time you hear a page turn in episodes I’ve worked on, it was created using one of these two books:

Sometimes, though, it’s not practical for me to use things I can find laying around. As much as I would have loved for Complexly to send me to a zoo to gather sounds for CC Zoology, it was much easier to use the sound library to which we subscribe and find animal sounds there.

Once I have all the ingredients, I set to work creating each audio cue. Because we might have several of the same visual cue in quick succession (like several vocabulary words in a row), I try to create several versions of each one. I start with a base sound (for Zoology’s Front Terms this was a rattlesnake rattle) and add different layers on top (a lion’s roar for one, an elephant bellow to another, a monkey hoot to a third). You can hear some examples at 0:12 in the audio file that accompanies this post!

Since they’re all built on a common sound and all the layers are run through the same or similar effects chains, we get cues that are linked, but distinct. Some sounds only use a couple layers, but sometimes there are a bunch.

For the musical stings that accompany full screen transition wipes, I use different chords for each series played on the same synthesizer. It’s difficult to make those quite as meaningful as using sounds associated with the subject, but there are still ways to do it, even if they’re kind of a stretch. For CC Geography, I used a G/E° chord (which isn’t actually a thing in music theory, but that didn’t stop me from Frankensteining something along those lines). Zoology was a bit more straightforward: I just googled “animal chord” and used the first chord of each of the first two songs that showed up (Bb from Animal by Def Leppard and F from Animal by Neon Trees, if you’re curious).

After designing CC Geography, I realized some of the sounds fit so well that I decided to carry them over to other series! Sometimes they get reused without modification, like scratching out a single line with a fountain pen, which you can hear at 0:28 in the audio file.

Other times, I just carry a single element through. For example, in each series I work on, the Thought Bubble intro animation has the same basic typewriter sound accompanying the animation; however, I add different sounds for the Thought Cafe logo reveal and the intro card being pulled away that are consistent with the other sounds in that series. This helps reinforce a consistent sonic identity for Crash Course and Complexly, while still allowing room to give each series its own flavor. You can hear these at 0:38 in the audio file.

There’s still more work to be done after all that is complete—at the very least, each episode requires its own design, which is also a combination of library sounds and foley I record, but these are largely unique to each animation.

I build upon the initial cue list as a series goes on, as well—the final sound list for Zoology has quite a few more than it did in the first photo:

The details of the process are always being refined and modified, but this is the general overview of how the sound for each episode gets made. Hopefully you enjoyed a peek into what goes into making Crash Course. Thanks for reading, and thank you for supporting us!