the 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!

Here are the best books that I own & reccomend on the subject of film sound design!

The Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound by David Lewis Yewdall – if you only buy one book, I would buy this one. It is very practical & talks through every department & element of the soundtrack. The only caveat would be that it suffers slightly from the ‘bigger is better’ syndrome, but that comes down to aesthetics & taste which I wont debate here…

Audio-Vision by Michel Chion – this is the best book on film sound theory I have read – it is very thought provoking with a great foreword by Walter Murch.

Soundscape by Larry Sider – this is actually a copy of various lectures given at the School of Sound, a week long course held every two years in London. This book features lectures by Walter Murch, David Lynch, Randy Thom, Michel Chion, Carter Burwell and Mani Kaul amongst others….

Sound-On-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound by Vincent LoBrutto – this book contains some very interesting interviews including Walter Murch, Ben Burtt, Skip Lievesay, Gary Rydstrom, Mark Mangini and many others..

The Foley Grail by Vanessa Theme Ament – great insight into the world of the foley artist!

Dialogue editing for Motion Pictures by John Purcell – a very thorough, if a little dry, explanation of dialogue & ADR editing

The Sound Effects Bible by Ric Viers – a handy guide to recording sound effects

The Reel World: Scoring for Pictures by Jeff Rona – I don’t write music/score for film, but on every project I get to collaborate with film composers so I figure the more I know about film scoring the better!

Finally, its not a book but its the best online resource for sound design: filmsound.org

We did quite a lot of sound effects recording for Black Sheep and I was just sorting through the photos & thought I’d post a bunch of them…
it was a hell fun project!

Sheep recording
While I had a few sheep recordings in my library from my brothers farm, I knew I’d need more than a few for this film! I collected up some great recordings from the personal librarys of Kitt Rowlings, Don Paulin, Beth Treadray & Tom Miskin (much thanks!) & did a first pass of all of the sheep FX in the film. It became obvious there were still specific FX I needed (aside from vocals I also wanted sheep hooves on various surfaces) so I set up a recording session with the animal trainers for the film – James & Caroline of Hero Animals. Wow – what a great experience! The photo above shows the trained sheep responding to a few whistles from James.. After watching sheep attack people on film for the previous month I almost laughed out loud when this mob came bounding down the hill & swarmed us!

James could even blow a whistle & get the sheep to baaa as a group, very funny to see & hear I can assure you! I recorded lots of sheep vocals as well as close up breaths when the sheep were eating, for the carnivorous scenes in the film. I also recorded single sheep footsteps at various speeds, on grass & then inside the woolshed on wood. Everything was recorded using my trusty Sanken CSS5 stereo shotgun mic and Fostex FR2 hard disk recorder.

An intriging side note, James & Carolines farm is the one & same that was used as a main location in Peter Jackson’s first film Bad Taste and that James still had one of the alien’s masks form it! The trailer for Bad Taste is on youtube, here:

The trailer for black comedy/horror film BLACK SHEEP, which we did the sound design for June/July/August 2006 is on their website now, or heres a direct link to the quicktime movie.

I havent processed these recordings yet either, but here are a few snapshots of ambience recording locations from my travels….

The east coast of the South Island, near the Ashburton river mouth.

Lake Te Anau, Fiordland – the water was crystal clear.

Totaranui beach, Takaka
I captured three different timelapse shots/ambiences here & I plan to make them into a DVD. When winter gets nasty in Wellington I’ll just turn the heater up & watch/listen to it!

Wharariki beach, Takaka

A gentle breeze in dry long grass – near Wharariki beach, Takaka

I’ll upload the sounds soon, promise!

I managed to capture a few impulse responses for Altiverb while away on holiday. I haven’t gone through the recordings yet but once I have I’ll upload them and then update this post…

My nephew Morris firing my .22 starter pistol into a small metal silo on my brothers farm in Southland.

This IR had a nice metal zing to it!

This is inside a tin shed – figured it might be useful for ADR….

This is Echo Point, a spot on the road of the Western Inlet from Takaka. I discovered this spot many eears ago, when there was a sign saying: ‘Echo Point – startling echo heard here!’ The signs now gone but if you happen to explore this area, its by the road marker #99 on the Western Inlet. No doubt it sounds quite different when the tide is in…