AS Media Fight Sounds Practical

Fight Sounds Practical

Brief

From my research into issues normally conveyed in urban dramas, I explored violence in films. Usually in horrors, specifically 'slathers', the death is brutal but quick like multiple stabs. As we wish to create an urban drama with psychological horror elements, we want to create a memorable and chilling murder in our opening to somehow present the killer as complex.

Earlier I explored different motives and killing styles for our antagonist. In order to produce an incredibly graphic death we decided to choose a fight scene using no weapons and include suffocation to prolong the intense scene. Afterwards, the antagonist could then complete a signature by for example cutting the victim or decorating the body like in "Maniac" where the killer removes the scalp and sews it into mannequins or in "SE7EN" where each victim is somehow linked back to a deadly sin.

Consequently, I wanted to focus on producing sounds for the fight scenes. As we wanted it to be incredibly gruesome rather than just having punching and kicking sounds, I also looked up ideas for creating sounds of flesh ripping and bones breaking. I gathered tips from websites like "www.epicsound.com", "www.filmsound.org" and "www.asoundeffect.com".

Production

For body and face hits I learnt that I should create a 'defining' sound and an 'impact' sound for the most realistic and unique sound. This is evident and explained below:

"I like to think of such sounds as having two general components: a 'defining' one, and an 'impact' one. The defining one is what sounds up front and tells the listener what the sound is, especially if combined with picture. The impact one can be anything at all, designed only to pump up the sound to hyper-real. 

For defining sounds, simply record what things really are: For a face slap for example, record a real slap, hand clap, slap on thigh, etc. For a body kick, record a fist on chest thud, etc. For impact sounds, anything goes. A broomstick whacked really hard and flat onto a couch or mattress makes a great beefing-up component for a body hit. Other purely impact sounds: kick drum, fist-pound on closet door (tapered), car door slam (tapered), kicked or stick-hit cardboard box, leather belt snap, whip crack, etc.

In my opinion, especially what I'm loosely calling the 'impact' component can and often should be gain-maximized and mixed with the 'defining' so that the defining is still the part that gives the information as to what the sound is."

I created my 'defining' sounds by "chest thud[s]" and slapping my hands, which was inspired by the following:

"Try simply clapping or hitting your palm (with varying force – lightly too) close to a mic, add treble and then distort it (try both analogue dist and ordinary digital clipping)."

Below are my videos of these sounds:

In order to create the 'impact' sounds I selected the advice given from "www.epicsound.com". This included many unusual but also obvious techniques. Below are my attempts at recreating the sounds of body and face hits. One said:

"Use a baseball bat to hit a leather jacket wrapped around baseball gloves."

I thought this was incredibly specific and odd. I was unable to get a baseball bat, but I did use a boxing glove instead. Though, I thought this was not successful, and instead seemed strange. Here are the sounds it created:

I also was inspired by other ideas to actually use a leather belt for classic, almost cheesy fight sounds, these were influenced by:

"For a cheesy, “old-school” punching sound, I had success with:

·         Whip a fuzzy blanket in front of a microphone.

·         Compress the cr*p out of it until it starts to distort a bit.

·         Adjust EQ as you see fit. Some high mids did it for us."

Along with:

"A regular old bull whip crack is good for those over-the-top Street Fighter type punches."

The result was as follows:

Honestly, I thought this was too cheesy and exaggerated. It seemed too much like a whip or a slap rather than violent punches and pummels.

Most of the advice also said to include breaking of bones to make the hits seem more powerful. There even was a suggestion for making the sound of flesh being torn. As we really wanted to make a graphic fight scene I tried some of these. The majority said to use animal bones, but instead I used the sound from snapping a carrot, which came from the below statement:

"Celery/Carrots/Little Gem Lettuce – try freezing them too."

This led to the following sound:

Along with the food idea and the idea of also crunching different objects, inspired by:

"Take bone breaks, for example. You want to use something crunchy and snapping. For this I’d highly recommend Chinese cabbage or celery. Single leaves or sticks make great bone-snapping sounds when broken fast. When breaking or twisting several sticks or leaves at once it gets really brutal. This is perfect for crushing rib-cage sounds or any kind of dismemberment.
Carrots folded in a piece of leather make awesome ‘bone-snapping-under-the-skin’ sounds – and as sweeteners crunching e.g. cornflakes gives very good results."

I used everyday objects including spaghetti and cereal for the following sounds:

I liked the spaghetti sound, despite, it not totally sounding like bones breaking, it does sound like some kind of splintering and cracking. To have bones crack individually like that would show that the abuse is painfully slow and torturous. The cereal is similar in style but is more of a crushing sound. If we were to have the sound of someone screaming it would create discomfort and suggest torture.

Post-production

To piece all my sounds together and edit them I had to use "Adobe Audition CC 2015.3" as I was unable to use "Final Cut Pro X". I first imported them and created a multitrack called "Fight Sounds".

First, I singled out some of the 'impact' sounds to layer over the 'defining' sound. This was done by constantly splitting and trimming sounds heard from the clip and separating them. This means I could specifically place certain sounds in certain places rather than have them all play on top of one another and sound confusing. I deleted the sound of the carrot snapping as it wasn't very loud and lacked an actual snapping sound. I also deleted clips where there was background sound. However, due to the poor quality of my camera there is a constant high pitched buzz throughout.

Upon listening, I felt the slow crunching of the cereal and the snapping of spaghetti would not work with the quick slaps as they actually sound like a machine gun, but I continued and separated the 'defining' sounds and the 'impact' sounds by putting them into separate layers.

I added an 'outside reverb' of 5.5 to the chest thuds to make them sound lower pitch and deeper to sound like a more powerful and echoic punch. I used this as the main sound and then with the remaining sounds I layered them over top.

As said earlier the cereal and spaghetti sounds seem too slow, so I attempted to alter the tempo of them by 'shrinking' them with the "Stretch and Pitch" effect. I did this by double clicking the audio clip and then going to the "Effects" tab. Although, I felt the entire sound clip was too fast and still sounded like I just put many clips over each other, hence, making it seem like the sounds don't fit together in a fight scene. I researched videos online to try and learn about the program and successfully make the desired sound, however it was not helpful at all.

Outcome

Below is the final sound effect I created:

Personal Comments

I am incredibly disappointed with the outcome as it seemed far too confusing due to the fast paced tempo, merging of sounds and the large amount of layers of sound that didn't link with other sounds. Though, I did like the actual production of this practical, it was a shame that the post-production was a lot more challenging.

I will definitely consider next time to leave gaps between sounds so I can create a more realistic and sequenced sound effect rather than attempting to 'stretch' the audio. I would also collect more sound clips which would link to the scene like recording a better sound of the carrot snapping and even including voices of pain i.e. grunts etc.