Before we turn you lose on the Fourth of July we have an interesting Tip today that may give you some ideas for how to spend your time tomorrow. Matt Harwood, a Sweetwater Sales Assistant, spent a good deal of time in the film industry before coming to Sweetwater. One of his many talents (aside from being very Shaq-like on the basketball court) is sound design and foley work. We thought you would enjoy his recent submission of top 10 sound design challenges and his solutions for them. Here goes:
For most of these I used a simple mic/preamp setup with a DAT recorder. The names of the movies and shows these were for have been omitted so I just refer to generic problems I had to solve (sometimes many times).
– For the titanic of explosions I used 3 different doors. The first door was a large metal parking garage door. I unlatched the automatic pull of the door so that the door could fall freely at the slightest push. The door would slide down and SMASH into the ground. The second door was an old metal screen door that I found. It was falling apart so the metal on the door rattled after slamming it. The third door was a large wooden door that when layered with the rest provided the thump or low frequency part of the explosion. After recording and editing out of unwanted noise I slowed the recordings down and added various FX, The result was a bombastic in your face explosion…
– Someone got the idea at film school to light himself on fire and film him running around screaming like his flesh was melting off. How crazy an Idea this was did not even cross my mind; what did was, “Great I can do the sound for that!” So I thought, how can I make the sound of a man on fire burning while his flesh is burning and melting off? Believe it or not fire is EXTREMELY quiet. Think about it, when you have a campfire mostly what you hear are the logs cracking, not the whoosh of the fire. So what makes that whooshing sound. Wind or air…? Soooo… We had a gas stove that we set on high so the flames were as far as we could get them in the air. The next thing we did was blow on the flame to make it whoosh more. That got it. The flesh burning and melting was a big pot of macaroni and cheese being stirred around. There you have the fire whooshing and melting flesh! When you are actually doing the foley for the film you have to make the fire whoosh just right so that it can be believable. This isn’t easy, but I’d rather do that than be the guy who is on fire.
– A short wave radio tuning in. Don’t ask me how I thought of this one… If you have a small closed ended wrench about 1/2 inch in size, take your mouth curl you lips in, and place the wrench just inside your mouth, make sure that the wrench is vertical. Breathe in FAST and change the amount of airflow coming in to your lungs. The air passing over the wrench makes a high pitched sound that is almost identical to the tuning in of a short wave radio. Actually the sound is not very realistic and resembles the sound of a cartoon radio more than something real, however, the audience identifies with it immediately! Why not just use a real radio? Well, we didn’t have one available (I never said these films had a budget), and actually the real thing often sounds less like the real thing to an audience than the stuff we make up. It’s all perception. How many times have you heard a car’s tires screech when the scene showed the car on a dirt road? I rest my case.
– The inside of an alien space ship. This one I had a hard time with. What is the most foreign place to me, I thought. The inside of my body! So one day I made myself really hungry and recorded the growling of my stomach. I did several recordings of this: one where the mic was placed right on my skin next to my stomach, and another about one inch away from my stomach, and the last recording was in my mouth. I opened my moth as wide as I could and tried to make my throat open as well. At the time I was so hungry my stomach was extremely active! After slowed it down, reversed it, and put a small delay on, it sounded so strange and creepy that it was perfect for the scene.
– A LAZER BEAM… If you mic a long tightly wound spring that is stretched out, and smack it with a hammer, you will have yourself a recording of a LAZER Beam. Or at least that is one way of getting it.
– The lifting of a DEEP flesh wound bandage… This was for a film where a man was blown off his feet and landed on a stick that was later ripped out of his leg. Later in the film he checks the bandage to see how the wound is doing and I wanted to get the sound of the coagulated blood, the ripped flesh and the bandage peeling off of this mess. Well, mac and cheese to the rescue again! Stir that stuff around and you get the best fleshy sound. It worked great!
– A hail storm… A few friends of mine hoisted up buckets of gravel and placed them on the first level of scaffolding. On the ground we had several different textures like metal plastic rubber etc. we tipped the buckets of gravel slowly and as they fell on the various textures it sounded just like a hail storm. We were able change the textures depending on what was on the film at the time. We even placed an old beat up car under it to get the recording from inside.
– Tossing your cookies (barfing). [Ed- is that a candidate for WFTD?] For this we actually used two different sounds. One of them was an actor that had a raspy voice and did the typical heaving. The other was a bucket of water with clumps of pasta added. The combination is really gross when played with the image on film!
– Remember the story of people getting into the free fall at Six Flags and getting their scalp ripped off? Well guess what? The sound of getting your scalp ripped off is really easy to reproduce. Find yourself some packing tape, the thicker the better. At Sweetwater we have this tape that is about two inches wide, that works perfect. Grab the end of the spool and PULL. Combine that with the ripping of paper and you have yourself a silly sound that when played with a women getting her scalp ripped off is (in the black humor realm) quite funny!
– Bare Feet running down a hall in a school… For this I used my body again. I had someone slap my bare chest. Both their hands and my chest had to be wet to get the best sound. Stick some reverb on this sound and you can not tell the difference when placed to film. Perception is reality.
We hope you enjoyed that. We sure did. Maybe you can make use of that macaroni and cheese you’re going to be served at the picnic tomorrow. Just eat the burgers. Take the mac and cheese home to your studio and see what you can conjure up.