Tim Ritter's Production Corner

PRODUCTION CORNER #9
SOUND EFFECTS & TRAILERS
Many no-budget feature movies neglect one of the simplest (and fun) ways that add production value to the program: sound effects. It is fairly simple to add sound effects to your movie and with a bit of ingenuity, you can create them yourself. It may add a little bit of time to your post production schedule, but what's the rush anyway? Also, after successfully shooting your movie, there's virtually no one you have to coordinate things with to accomplish this task besides yourself and some sort of microphone system.
I see too many movies that neglect the area of sound effects. After all, the movie experience is all illusion, and to accomplish the illusion, you are creating a make-believe world out of moving pictures and sound. Sound includes the musical score and sound effects, both which add to the viewer's emotional experience when watching your flick. If sound effects weren't that important, people like George Lucas wouldn't have been improving upon sound systems (with the THX surround sound) for both the theatrical and video experience over the past decade. It is ultimately an integral part of the moviemaking process.
An example of optimum use of audible effects that are part of the story and almost characters unto themselves can be found in the expressive work of David Lynch. Check out his Lost Highway for a primo example of utilizing sound effects, music, and moving pictures to tell a surreal tale of madness and betrayal in mirrored realities. This may be an extreme example for some, but it's definitely a good "teaching" film for independent moviemakers and very inspiring. Note how complete silence in certain scenes creates atmosphere that is joltingly pierced by such jangles as an ordinary phone ringing. Additionally, the film's music placement and the way it stops and starts like a character unto itself is wildly fascinating. The use of dialogue reverbs and echoes is quite chilling as well, and all these are primo examples of things that you can do with your movie that cost very little and add this type of mood.
Too few no-budget flicks take advantage of layering their soundtracks to jazz things up a little, and I'm going to go through some things with you that I've done on my films to help add to the atmosphere of a more dynamic sound track. It's like a little extra icing on the cake, all for the price of a few items at the grocery store!
I first got inspired to create sound effects after reading about Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movie back in 1982 and then pursued more filmmaking books that covered sound effects for movies like The Exorcist and Star Wars. It's always fascinating to read how demon voices are conjured up by playing animal growls backwards or how a certain spaceship sound was derived from placing a microphone inside a Hoover vacuum cleaner.
I began my experimentation with sound effects with my 1984 super-8 movie Day Of The Reaper. This movie was shot all silent and everything was added later on video, some of it quite atrociously, I might add. (This is another story all together where we couldn't get any dialogue to sync so it looks like a badly dubbed Japanese movie!) For Reaper, I utilized a lot of those sound effects records and Halloween records that spotlighted heavy breathing and Chinese water torture gags. I also remember getting kind of creative and setting up a couple of stereo speakers against the microphone that was plugged into the "audio dub" channel of the VCR. From the stereo, I had access to dual cassettes, a phonograph, and any sounds I might "foley" myself as I watched the movie. ("Foley" artists are people who create sound effects in a studio environment while watching a film. This can be anything from closing doors, footsteps, to fake punches.)
Overall, most of what I did came off ridiculous, but you have to learn somehow! I do remember walking on a squeaky desk chair as a character walks to simulate footsteps and dubbing in some gun shots from a record where the lead psycho gets shot. At one point I had a Quiet Riot cassette in the stereo and hit that instead of my sound effects and well...it's still in the movie to this day!
As my filmmaking attempts got more serious, I got involved with the sound effects more and more. By 1987, I had shot my second 16mm film, Killing Spree, and I was heavily involved with the sound effects. Spree dealt primarily with violent deaths and returning zombies, not to mention a Creepshow-ish tone that lent itself to a comic atmosphere. Therefore, I felt we could exaggerate most of the sound effects and get away with it.
During the end of the postproduction phase of your movie, as you dub in music and sound effects, this is a great time to edit a "trailer" for your movie. What is a trailer? It's also known as a "preview" of your movie, one that can be used to help lure the interests of a distributor. A good trailer will also be used by the distributor to help promote your flick on other tapes or in film festivals. A decent trailer should run anywhere from two to four minutes and contain some of the best moments of your movie---the action scenes, the chases, the effects, that sort of thing.
Be careful to keep this preview "general" for all audiences…in other words, if you have "exploitation" elements in your movie, don't show them in all their rawness here, just hint at them. The idea is to make people want to see your movie in it's entirety. There's nothing worse than seeing a trailer that gives away every good scene in the movie and when a viewer finally catches the movie, there's no surprises at all. That's a good way to get very bad word-of-mouth.
Making a trailer can be difficult. You have to tell your story and sell your product in a very limited amount of time. My best advice for learning how to do this properly is to go out and watch a ton of trailers. They are commonly put on many DVD releases as extras and in the horror world, you can actually purchase entire tapes that have nothing but movie commercials on them from any era in time! This is a huge benefit and can help you find a style you like. It will also show you what works and what doesn't work. Sometimes it's wise to cut three of four different trailers that can be used in different ways by you and the distributor. For some excellent examples of this, check out the DVDs for Jaws and The Exorcist. More modern examples might include The Matrix and Joyride. There's plenty of great ideas here and I recently picked up The Texas Chainsaw Massacre DVD, which has a ton of different trailers for theatrical, TV, and video releases that you can learn a great deal from.
We cut the Killing Spree trailer for the Cannes Film Festival together first, and it ran about eight minutes. I still remember assembling the trailer and then having to add the sound effects as quickly as possible. It was a Saturday afternoon and we met the sound recordist in his living room, where he had set up a quarter inch, reel-to-reel deck and several cool microphones around the room. The quarter inch tape insured that the speed could be controlled to match the thirty-frames per second of the videotape dubbing later on.
Before arriving at the living room, we had done some grocery shopping: lettuce, tomatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, nachos, potato chips, and some gravy mix. Once in the living room, we set up. Perry and I and a couple of other dudes were each stationed at a microphone. We each took a grocery item and stood at our respective microphone with a utensil ready to make them sing. It was almost like we were some sort of deranged band, like GWAR or something. As we watched the fully-edited trailer, we recorded our sound effects live as they happened on the television monitor. Mainly we were concerned with the gore sound effects and this is what we came up with: the ka-thunk heard for a screwdriver going into a cranium was a large knife shoved into the watermelon; the dislocation of an old woman's jaw with a clawhammer started out with a poke to the cannelloni for impact, followed by the "jaw removal" sound courtesy of a hand full of nachos being crunched appropriately on cue, and the waterfall of blood gushing our her maw was covered by dropping chunks of melon into a bowl full of liquid gravy. The chopping off of the top of someone's head via machete was achieved nicely by hacking a large tomato with a butcher knife on a Styrofoam surface, a shovel smashed into someone's face included the duet of a roll of paper towels being smacked onto a pot lid (for the ding! sound) and a concurrent whack to the watermelon with a hammer. This gave the effect a solid "hit" feel with the addition of the shovel ringing after impact!
Finally, we achieved the "zombie" sounds when some characters come back from the dead by borrowing a bit from The Exorcist. Perry Monroe had a friend whose cat hated baths, and they simply recorded the aggravated screeches the kitty made while getting clean on reel-to-reel quarter inch tape. Then we slowed the tape down and played the cat sounds backwards, creating a very eerie effect that could easily be a bunch of demonic zombies groaning as their reanimated souls scream. In retrospect, I think we may have used this sound effect a bit too much in the finished movie…
Sound effects are pretty easy to add into your video on the second audio track, and sometimes a little mixing is required if you need music and a few sound effects going at the same time. They can be recorded on another videotape of your movie separately, utilizing both audio tracks to your advantage.
In other words, make a dub of your movie on the format you're working with and put the music over the dialogue tracks and your sound effects on the second ("B") audio track. (It's better to have no dialogue at all on this tape, it's basically your M&E, or music and effects track.) Then go back to your Master tape and mix this tape onto track "B", via audio insert, and you have your music and sound effects laid in. You also then have a music and effects tape if it's ever needed for a foreign sales contract! You will need to rent professional editing time for all of this, but if you're prepared with your M&E tracks, it shouldn't take more than a few hours to sync it all up. With Super VHS, Hi8, and 3/4" video, this shouldn't be more than a couple hundred dollars. Record levels can be controlled on the deck with your master tape. This is the most basic way for dubbing music and sound effects in, and the most cost-efficient.
Obviously, things can get more complex and expensive when you bring in mixing boards, more sound effects, and bigger studios that charge more. Of course, the aforementioned method is strictly for editing the old school way, with very basic video tape machines and an edit controller.
The best way (and most modern way) to lay sound effects into your movie is by using nonlinear editing. These days, it's just about as easy as a click of the mouse! Many nonlinear computer editing programs come with incredible software and sound effects libraries that you can purchase and download into your computer. Then you simply "point and drag" your sound effect where you want it and magically, it's there! You still might have to record and create your own sound effects, though, because your imagination might exceed what is commercially available. No problem, though, you just record what you need and dump it into your computer!
When it came time for dubbing the sound effects into the final cut of Killing Spree, we basically went the old-fashioned route with the exception of one night where we needed more than one sound effect going onto track "B" with music. That night we brought in a mixing board and were able to add as many additional sounds as we needed directly from the "sampler" on the mixing board, which also was able to record new effects right there in the studio.
Additional sound effects on Killing Spree included snapping a celery stick for the sound of a reanimated decapitated head champing down on a victim, two by fours clapped together to simulate a punch to someone's face, a wicker basket being bent and twisted by yours truly directly against the microphone to simulate crackling flames, smashing florescent lightbulbs in Perry Monroe's driveway to add to the sound of a sliding glass door being shattered, and many melons dropped on the hard concrete for that "wet smacking sound" we needed for moments of impact when body parts fall to the floor. We had quite a fun time coming up with these crazy sounds! Be sure to wear old clothes or a butcher's apron when performing these activities, otherwise you'll ruin your clothes!
I always keep the sound effects I create for each movie on audio files and inevitably have ended up with a whole library to choose from for each project. I have transferred them all to videotape so that they can be easily synched up and cut exactly onto a track "B" of a video master or pumped directly into any computer system. This makes each project much easier to finish, especially when you have a variety of effects to choose from.
If I need new sound effects, I just go out and create them. Working primarily on video now, I usually just use a video camera with a good extended mike on it and go out and record the sound effects I might need and dub it right into the program. This is where the no-budget moviemaker can have some fun and build up their own no-budget library for future use. I've also found that the under-$100 Radio Shack sound effects mixer is great for adding echoes and reverbs to character's dialogue and any number of sound effects adjustments. With this device, you can create and fine tune your effects to sound endlessly weird and professional. All you do is re-record what you've done onto another tape (putting the mixer in between both units) and tinker with the dials, altering the original sound until you get what you want. Then dub your new creation directly onto your master tape or put it into your computer editing system.
For Wicked Games, we primarily drew from the sound effects library we had already created. We did have some actresses come in and do some stock scream and grunt sounds for various choking sequences and also drew some stuff off of sound effects records, which you can purchase through the back of magazines like Videomaker magazine. Sound effects CDs are pretty cool, but usually you end up using their sound effects for different things than they were meant for. For example, we had a scene where a character falls on a sprinkler and it comes on, jetting blood all over the place. After the stock ka-thump of the sharp object penetrating flesh, what would a blood spurting sprinkler sound like? Well, on an old sound effects record, I found the sound of a tired dishwasher to be more than appropriate, especially with all its hissing, rattling and shaking. It definitely enhances the sequence!
Gunshots are always problematic sound-wise, and I've found that recording real guns being fired off just doesn't cut it. Most come across as "cap" sounds and aren't nearly imposing enough, especially when you want that "Dirty Harry" cannon blasting sound. We took some gunshots and sampled them on a synthesizer in a sound studio, then added the appropriate BOOM! to the sound , giving it that much-needed Hollywood punch.
By the time I got to Creep, I knew exactly what we'd need sound effects-wise and even wrote some of the audible things we'd need directly into the script. A neck being cracked was a bunch of celery sticks snapped in half, an auger through the head was a pick being jammed through a watermelon , and the flashbacks of our heroine as a child screaming were all shot silent. Later, in the editing phase, we had Joel Wynkoop's daughter Lisa come in and do the screaming and crying, echoing and distorting all this appropriately with the sound effects mixer. Worked like a charm.
It's always good to enhance sound effects that only sounded "okay" in their original incarnation (such as what was recorded live on the set). For instance, the building blowing up at the end of Creep sounded...well, like a small bomb going off. But it certainly lacked the gangbuster BOOM! I wanted as our characters were obliterated, so I went through some studio sound effects discs and found some old recordings of World War II bombs going off and sweetened the track with that carnage! It certainly gave that scene the extra zest it needed. The important thing is to be creative and to actually OVERDO things like Hollywood would. Think over the top! You're trying to get emotional impact and involvement from an audience.
Another scene we sweetened a bit with sound effects was when the Creep blowtorches a victim's head. We edited it together and it looked pretty phony. It actually called attention to itself, even with "quick cuts" of the prosthetic head on fire. But when I added the wicker basket "flame" sounds from Killing Spree as the fire engulfed the head, the scene seemed a little more satisfying. Throwing in some random screams, I figured that with any luck, people would turn away at the horrid sounds and not even watch the rather chintzy special effect that we had come up with on our meager budget. Sometimes a good sound effect can help salvage a weak or make people look away when you need them to!
The sound effects on my next project were even more complex, as it was the thirty-five minute contribution to Kevin Lindenmuth's sci-fi Alien Agenda series. My segment, entitled Ransom, was on the Endangered Species volume. Set in post-apocalyptic Florida, we created lots of futuristic sounds for this one and had a blast!
R. M. Hoopes created electrical "rumbling" thunderstorms for background noise that was dubbed over traffic ambiance that was audible from our location shoots. It was next to impossible getting total background "silence" for any scene in overpopulated Florida, so we ended up having to strip out most of our location sound, adding in our own "sci-fi" ambiance for the flavor of the segment. Hoopes also created a cool "tracking device" sound and a low alien power source "rumbling" for the satellite station featured in the film as an alien gateway. He used his synthesizer to create all these sounds, so don't forget to consult with your music composer when you need new sound effects.
Out of all the things I've edited, Ransom was probably the most tedious in terms of post-production dubbing. For one scene where a character gets "stunned" unconscious by an alien with a weird-looking gun, I found a "staple gun" sound effect on a CD that was perfect for the ka-thump I imagined such a weapon would make! It seemed to work and this smooth sound easily relayed to the audience that the character was merely "stunned." Another scene had hybrid kids cannibalizing their father like Romero zombies, and we found a sound effects cut called "cats eating" and dubbed it in. It added a suitably nauseating mood to the scene. I don't know what those cats were eating, but they sure were chowing down like there was no end to it! Chomp, chomp, chomp, smack, slurp, chomp...
The hardest (and most time-consuming) thing we dubbed in for the Ransom segment was the punches for the end karate fight scene. When we filmed it, it was a hundred degrees out and Joel Wynkoop choreographed it as best he could, but upon inspecting the final sequence, I almost cut it out. It was missing something and seemed so fake. I recorded a variety of "impact sounds" (to pillows, mattresses, walls, and boards) and selected the best ones for each point of impact. Then I began experimenting with these punching sounds and slowly and painstakingly layered them into the sequence, frame by frame, each time one of the adversaries struck the other. Talk about adding a new dimension to the scene, it took on a whole new life! It took about twenty-six hours to dub in all the punches to this short two-minute sequence, but it was well worth it in the end.
Sound effects have become pretty easy for me with every subsequent project after Ransom. With the library of effects I've built up and the availability of sound effects CDs and computer programs, it's been pretty much a culmination of everything I've learned and done from previous projects. I am able to pretty much blast through any variety of sounds that I need, including: punches, kicks, laser guns, time-travel devices, reverbs, echoes, screaming, squishy moments of impact, and even bodies slamming to the ground after being thrown from cliffs (see 2003's Alien Conspiracy: Beyond The Lost World for samples of all this).
Remember that sound effects can help sell almost any scene, even if it's something that happens off screen (like a car crash). Even with limited funds, a filmmaker needs to reach out and give the audience as much emotional involvement that he can with sensory overload. Make them see, hear and feel for your characters. Sound effects are a spectacular tool that you can use to accomplish part of your creative mission. By all means, take advantage of them!