21/05/2026
🔥 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.
