Music of Sound

ok, guess the instrument:

clue 1: its a percussion instrument

clue 2: its not electric

Aside from vegetables we also did a wood FX recording and some cloth ripping FX. We managed to find an old chest of drawers at the junkstore for $10, plus a selection of various blankets, towells, sheets etc for tearing apart… money well spent!

First to go was the individual drawers, then the outer shell filled with debris and then each of the remaining pieces until all we had left was a pile of debris.

I also collected up a bag full of drift wood from the beach, which provided many variations on breaks, snaps etc but we also found a number of great creaks by tightly bending & manipulating with pliers. Recording some of these sounds we switched the dynamic mic for my Trance Inducer contact mic, which made some of the very subtle creaks sound MASSIVE! Pictured is Age Pryor, FX Assistant, manipulating wood with pliers..

As the film is set on a farm there are a number of times when people clamber over wire fences so Age built a fence structure, great sounding but not so functional at keeping sheep in a paddock! By stressing & wrangling the wire, the wood resonated really nicely… another one for the contact mic, some of these sounds were also used as part of creepy ambiences when inside the shearing shed etc..

My one other inspired idea for violence sound effects was seaweed!
When I was out collecting some of the driftwood we recorded, I stood on some old dried out seaweed and it made some VERY interesting snapping sounds! I suspect its because seaweed has a lot of pockets of air trapped inside it, not sure… So we collected up a big stack of seaweed (well Kristin did, much thanks!) and then totally dried it out using fan heaters & set to & broke, twisted & gouged it in as many ways as possible. It also created some good debris sounds as it broke down into smaller pieces.

Its good for the garden too!
I’ll post a photo of my 11 foot high sunflower once it flowers!

Ever since doing Worlds Fastest Indian I really enjoy recording vehicle sound effects and Black Sheep had two main vehicles we needed to augment – a good old Landrover and a classic Morris 1300… Luckily we got access to them both at Pikarari, a farm south of Titahi Bay..

The Landrover was a bit stuffed – first gear graunched & grated like crazy (which we also recorded for the library) but once I got going it ran well & I spent an hour or more performing variations of all of the moves in the film. We had the landrover wired up to record onboard sound the whole time so we ended up with lots of good onboard recordings (one dynamic mic on the exhaust & the other on the motor)

Matt Lambourn recorded all the exterior moves using his Sound Devices 722 & my Sanken CSS5 mic. We also recorded some good heavy body falls onto grass by throwing around an old tractor tyre that happened to be on the back of the landrover…

The mighty Morris 1300 – I drove again, but this was a bumpier ride as the Morris had been lowered & had hardly any suspension… a fun car though – i’d love a restored one except refitted as a hybrid, future retro style!

We got finished just as the sunset…

A new year, a new project and this one looks to be seriously wicked!

The film is based on the graphic novel by Steve Niles and is being produced by Rob Tapert and Chloe Smith for GhostHouse Pictures and directed by David Slade, who’s last film was Hard Candy.

GhostHouse have a production diary with some great location video clips. The shoot was finished just before xmas, so post production has just started – not sure what the release date is but will update here when I find out….

For the sounds of violence & gore in the film I decided to do a major studio based FX recording session involving as wide a selection of sound generating vegetables as we could muster. I did this for a project a few years ago & got great results, but wanted new material for this film.
Age Pryor, the FX Assistant went off to the supermarket & came back with los of crunchy material (such as celery, cabbage, carrots, pumpkin, eggs, nuts) and squelchy material (such as oranges, persimon, rock melon, water melon, mussels in their shells, baked beans, yoghurt) for some seriously messy fun! You would be surprised how wide a range of incredibly gross, revolting sounds can be made, even with a simple orange or a rock melon! If you dont believe me, wait until you see Black Sheep & have a good listen to the offal pit scene!

Matt Lambourn, FX Editor, manipulating some celery… this was great for bone break elements & wrenches. We also recorded some of the celery wrapped in cloth, which worked well as elements for some of the body tranforming sound design.
We recorded to my FR2 24bit/96k using a dbx preamp and a combination of a Neumann KMR81 short shotgun mic and an EV RE27 dynamic mic.

We also wanted a selection of bites & eating – so each person involved in the session had their turn at contributing variations. Pictured is Chris Todd, dialog and ADR editor, munching and fully in character!

Many vegetables died for a good cause, including these two!