Sound Effects
- Thread starter clarkage
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SMuir
Well-known member
freesound.iua.upf.edu has plenty of user-submitted recordings. Quality varies, but the sounds are all creative commons licensed.
sounddogs.com will cost you a few bucks, but they have a huge and easily navagable library of great effects.
Over-the-top jaw socks and kung-fu movie punches are easy enough to find, but more naturalistic fight sound design can be rather complex. Drunken Master, Walker: Texas Ranger, Fight Club, and Raging Bull each take a different approach to fight sounds, and although I'm a big fan of the visceral and complex style of the latter two, the martial arts genre has an audio short-hand all of its own.
A single punch could be made up of numerous elements, for example:
a breathy whoosh for the swinging fist (bamboo fishing pole)
a sharp crack (riding crop smacking a neoprene flutter-board)
a thud element (whallopping a leather punching bag)
a bass add (a heavier open-handed punching bag hit recorded with a kick-drum mic)
cracking ribs (rigatonni wrapped in damp chamois and crushed)
Try to differentiate the sounds of various types of hits. Torso hits should be more resonant than arm or head hits. Bass elements will sound heavy, but sharper elements will sound more traumatic.
Cabbages make a good stand-in for human heads, and celery's another old stand-by for broken bones. More esoteric elements can also provide specific effects: whip cracks, breaking glass, and bass drum hits all come to mind. Pay close attention to Raging Bull's sound design, and you'll hear heavily manipulated animal sounds (among other things).
Before you get too hung up on punches and kicks, though, don't forget about the other foley and vocal elements.
sounddogs.com will cost you a few bucks, but they have a huge and easily navagable library of great effects.
Over-the-top jaw socks and kung-fu movie punches are easy enough to find, but more naturalistic fight sound design can be rather complex. Drunken Master, Walker: Texas Ranger, Fight Club, and Raging Bull each take a different approach to fight sounds, and although I'm a big fan of the visceral and complex style of the latter two, the martial arts genre has an audio short-hand all of its own.
A single punch could be made up of numerous elements, for example:
a breathy whoosh for the swinging fist (bamboo fishing pole)
a sharp crack (riding crop smacking a neoprene flutter-board)
a thud element (whallopping a leather punching bag)
a bass add (a heavier open-handed punching bag hit recorded with a kick-drum mic)
cracking ribs (rigatonni wrapped in damp chamois and crushed)
Try to differentiate the sounds of various types of hits. Torso hits should be more resonant than arm or head hits. Bass elements will sound heavy, but sharper elements will sound more traumatic.
Cabbages make a good stand-in for human heads, and celery's another old stand-by for broken bones. More esoteric elements can also provide specific effects: whip cracks, breaking glass, and bass drum hits all come to mind. Pay close attention to Raging Bull's sound design, and you'll hear heavily manipulated animal sounds (among other things).
Before you get too hung up on punches and kicks, though, don't forget about the other foley and vocal elements.
Gohanto
Veteran
Punching yourself and throwing yourself into walls gets pretty real sound FX. Just be careful (having to explain to your roommate WHY you knocked the wind out of yourself is a little awkward).
Also, I think the grunt after getting hit is the key to "real" sounding hits a lot of short film miss.
Also, I think the grunt after getting hit is the key to "real" sounding hits a lot of short film miss.
Noiz2
Sound Ninja
SMuir hit the nail on the head so to speak. What KIND of fight scene?
Big action fights are made up of a bunch of tracks pretty much as he outlined, a whoosh , a high, a mid and a low. Not all four all the time but about 80%, depends a lot on how fast the hits are coming.
You need a lot of hits (for variety - unless your mimicking old school Hong Kong Action films*). Good things to try are sticks swinging for the whooshes (probably have to slow them down a bit), baseball bat on pillows, rolled phone book with gaff tape around it, anything solid and has some softness. Punching a slab of mead is always good. Vegetable mutilation is good for bone breaks and skull crushes and the like.
For more realistic punches you have to pull WAY back. If it sounds light and a bit undefined it will in general sound more "real".
Big action fights are made up of a bunch of tracks pretty much as he outlined, a whoosh , a high, a mid and a low. Not all four all the time but about 80%, depends a lot on how fast the hits are coming.
You need a lot of hits (for variety - unless your mimicking old school Hong Kong Action films*). Good things to try are sticks swinging for the whooshes (probably have to slow them down a bit), baseball bat on pillows, rolled phone book with gaff tape around it, anything solid and has some softness. Punching a slab of mead is always good. Vegetable mutilation is good for bone breaks and skull crushes and the like.
For more realistic punches you have to pull WAY back. If it sounds light and a bit undefined it will in general sound more "real".
SMuir
Well-known member
A good point. Although you're impulse may be to mic the hits as closely as possible, close-mic'ing even an extremely heavy punch will often result in a small and "tappy" sound. On the other hand, a comparatively light open-handed smack will often sound much heavier when mic'd from a few feet away. Generally speaking, a "thicker" or "denser" sound is preferable to one that is merely "louder."
I totally forgot about "meat punches." Andy Malcolm and Don White recorded some fantastic fight foley for "A History of Violence" using a large un-cooked pot-roast. Be sure to use a boneless cut of meat, or you could hurt your hands. If you wash your hands/fists thoroughly before starting, you could even throw some of your props into a slow-cooker when you're done. I made a rather tasty soup out of the roasting chicken we used for the stabbing in "Red Dragon."
Here are a few other props you could try:
Whole roasting chicken (for stabs and bone breaks)
Extra large whole ham
Riot batons
Acorn squash (for hard head hits)
leather speed bag
leather belt (for extra slap)
large leather couch cushions
leather mallet
large block of Ballistics gel
leather medicine ball
crash mats (for a heavy add)
cooperative boxers/martial artists
Whole Smoked summer-sausage (use as a heavy, meaty fist surrogate for punches and blocks)
a short burst of air blown into an AKG D112 (an air displacement whoosh for that slow-motion crescent kick).
Sharp, percussive cloth moves can also go a long way towards giving the impression of energy, especially for those punches and kicks that don't connect.
Luis Caffesse
Admin
That's awesome.
Hmmmm - there's an idea for you, a combination foley studio/restaurant.
One of a kind dishes named after the films they were used in.
Tender "Red Dragon" Chicken