September 23, 2025 • 49 mins
Sound effects are one of the unsung parts of any movie or TV show – they’re best when you don’t even notice them making what you see on screen even more real, and when they’re off you notice immediately. Learn how hard this amazing craft is in this episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know. I got nothing.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Hey, that was a sound effect in and of itself.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I guess I don't know if it really qualifies, but
I appreciate the support. Chuck.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
It was Josh introing the show as he falls off
of a cliff.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
You know, it's Josh in space.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah that doo.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, the cliff works too.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I just I like you in space better than dying.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Thank you. I appreciate that. But I think that really
goes to illustrate just how versatile sound effects can be.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Yeah, I'm excited about this one.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I am too. This was a Dave joint. He helps
us with this, and I knew nothing about this stuff.
I mean, I knew that the people who make this
are often called fully artists when they do a specific
kind of thing, but just like the little details and everything,
and it was all new to me and it was
all super interesting. So I'm psyched to buy this one too.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, me too. So what we're talking about is sound effects.
If you haven't gathered that by now. And you know,
I never assume what people know about movie making because
I worked in that field for a little while and
you and I did a TV show, like you know
some stuff about it. But I never assume that people
know things or not. So we should say right out
(01:32):
of the gate, when you're watching a movie, you're watching
a TV show or something like that. And also this
stuff is for animation and video games and all that stuff,
but we're mainly talking about, you know, live action stuff.
When you see a car drive down the road or
a couple sitting in a restaurant having a conversation and
you hear all the people in the background and you
hear that car drive down the road or anything you
(01:54):
hear a door shut, footsteps. All of that stuff is
created in post production, either by a person doing it
a folly artist, which we're going to talk a lot about,
or it might be from a sound catalog like where
you have all kinds of recordings you can pull from right,
car door shut stuff like that, or sometimes you know
that stuff now obviously is created through the wizardry of computering.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, but there's a surprising craft that's still left that
has not been pushed out by computers. Yet that seems
like this sort of happened years ago. But the work
that the folly artists do is so intricate and so
well done. Yeah, computers just can't replicate it yet, Like, yeah,
they there's a car door. Sound sounds good, but it
(02:41):
just doesn't quite work. And the reason why, from what
I saw all the explanations I saw, basically said, fully
artists are there sound actors, so they're acting along with
the actors on screen to make the sounds that you
know and love and actually don't even notice, but you
would notice. So if they weren't there or they were.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Off, yeah, for sure. And two more quick points for me.
Sound is often overlooked I think by the general public
in a movie or TV show for sure, And even
as you've seen my friend on actual sets, it's half
the thing is what you're hearing. The other half is
what you're seeing. But the sound department, every sound department
(03:23):
I've ever worked with, is always like just they're shoved
to the side, and you know, you know, they make
room for the camera and everything in the lighting, and
then there's a boom person that's like, oh, don't worry
about me. Like I also have to stand in this room. Yeah,
do like half the sound they're always you know, just
shoved off to the side, which is incredible that it's
still sort of like that. And also, you know, getting
(03:45):
back to what I said before about how every sound
you hear basically that is not dialogue or music like
soundtrack stuff or unless it's diegetic sound actually screws things
up on recording out in the world. Like that's what
they try to shoot as much as they can on
a stage, because if you're out on the street, you
often hear the term houlter sound because there's a lawn
(04:07):
mower and they may add a lot more later to
make something more real, but they don't want the lawn
mower that's actually there or the plane flying over. They
could add all of that stuff, the birds chirping. They
add all that stuff later to make it real, but
you can't have any of that on the day while
you're shooting, so you're always holding for sound, waiting for
the car or the train or the leaf blower. And
(04:28):
that's why they shoot like restaurants seems like completely silent.
Everybody is miming talking in the background, and it's really weird.
When you see like a clip of it.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Oh, it's definitely where. It's also weird to be like
in the middle of it, trying to act when everybody
around you in the restaurant is silently miming.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, and it's also hard. I did an extra thing
or two. That's hard to do.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah, for sure, I'm sure those are two sides of
the same coin. Yeah, so those are two great quick
points seven quick points from me. That's about how Oh
so you said a word back there a minute ago,
diagetic and that stood out to me, like what And
the reason why I didn't stop you and say, what
(05:11):
are you talking about, Chuck, is because I already know
what it means, so I feel like I should explain it.
Diegetic sound is the sound inside the movie's world. So
if you were one of the characters or the extras
or anybody in that movie, you would hear these sounds
like that lawn mower, that car driving by, the machine gun.
You know it's from the car driving by. That's my
(05:34):
best one.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah. I mean a lot of times you hear it
in terms of music, like when they're playing something in
the car that they're hearing. Sure, and then a very
common sort of thing to do is then that becomes
the soundtrack. It like kind of changes the tone a
little bit. You know, yeah, it's always great.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
But so that would be diegetic music. But like the
score that's just going along with it, that would be
non diegetic because the characters aren't hearing that same with narration.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, unless it's like a naked gun kind of thing,
and then they might like the strings will swell. Then
soon it will be like did you hear that?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Has Ruby taken you to the new Naked Gun?
Speaker 1 (06:09):
I took myself Scotty and.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
I went, oh, really, how was it?
Speaker 1 (06:12):
It's very very very funny.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Really, So do you know Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson
are a couple? Now?
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I wondered about that because they're both people at a
certain stage in life that are without their partners and
for very different reasons. But I kind of was like,
you know that, I kind of hoped they would get together.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Well they did, Buddy, your loves came true.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
She's very funny in it. I don't know if it's
still out, but I highly recommend seeing it in a
theater with laughing with a group of people. Okay, good
to know, but it's probably too late for that.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
So so you talked about how you hold for lawnmower
and all that, and that that stuff's added on later.
I think something like ninety percent. I've actually seen higher
than that of the sound you hear in the film
that's not dialogue or music is added later on and
post production. That's how important this stuff is. And like
you said, though, it just it gets treated like a
(07:06):
second class citizen despite how hard they work. And I
think if we get across anything in this episode, it
should be how hard and creative the people who make
sound effects are.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, for sure. And again we're going to get into
the foly stuff and mention things like sound banks of
doors shutting and wind blowing and all that stuff that
you can pull from. But a lot of times you
have sound designers that go out and make their own
recordings of that stuff. They just that they don't want
the universal catalog of car doors shutting. They want to
(07:40):
get their own, maybe it's a specific car. In fact,
that's that's what they should be doing, because card doors
are very specific the sound they make.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
So they'll go out in the field.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
There's a whole movie about that blow up. I'm Sorry.
Blowout with John Travolta, where he played a guy that
captures the sound of a car crash that ends up
being very you know, murderous.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, yeah, that was actually a pretty good movie. Great,
this is a classic, right, don't people consider a classic?
There's also so in addition to card or shutting, like
the vehicles themselves, the sounds they make those are often
like from a sound library, but I've also seen that
they'll be layered. They'll like add certain details sometimes later
(08:21):
on onto the sound library file called sweetening, And that's
that seems to be a pretty common thing. Even if
you're taking stuff that you're making out in the field yourself,
or you're making in the studio as you're watching the clip,
you'll probably still layer all that stuff together to get
like the most realistic, richest possible sound.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, they get really into it. It's a good nerdy
sort of line of work. You gotta have a good ear,
that's for sure. You're because you're recreating you know, punches
and slaps and every gunshot that you hear in every
movie is not what you hear on set obviously, and
then of course you know this is all stuff done.
It's like real sound effects. A lot of the things
(09:04):
that are created to be a computer are, but not
all of them are things that don't exist. You know,
like if you're going to do like a movie set
in out of Space, you're going to be making up
a lot of brand new sounds that have never been
made before.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, they seem to love that stuff because they have,
like Carte Blanc, to just go nuts and get creative.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Basically it's awesome.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Another one that gets left out that sounds really boring
but apparently it's really hard. Or footsteps. I'm sure there's
tons of sound effects of footsteps in libraries, but those
don't work from what I've seen, from what I've read
there essentially there because somebody put them there. People don't
use them. You have to make the footsteps based on
(09:48):
the actor and how they're moving, and not just in
sync with them. But a good folly artist will take
into account the weight, the height, the gait. Are they shuffle,
are they high stepping or they goose stepping. They're like,
they take all this stuff into account to make a
specific kind of walk or footfall for a particular actor.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Yeah, and a lot of times the stuff is dictated
by budget. Obviously, folly artists don't come cheap. So if
you've ever been watching a low budget movie and the
footsteps sounded kind of corny, it's probably because they're pulling
from a library.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Probably they're trying their best.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
They're doing their best. They don't have the kind of
dough for that, so you know, it all just depends.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
So I say, do you want to go back to
the beginning of all.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
This, yeah, which is surprisingly silent movies, right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Well, apparently because you further back than that to vaudeville
before there were even movies, people would play along on
stage to make sound effects with vaudeville act so it
was a pretty brainless transition from vaudeville stages to the
stage underneath a movie, and it was just somebody playing
(10:59):
a lot I think to start with like drums and
like maybe some clackers and a few different things. But
it very quickly took off as like a cottage industry
to make props for people who did this live to use.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, props or traps traps baby short for contraption, And
a lot of times it was percussionists, even if they
weren't literally playing drums, because percussionists are just good at
doing multiple things with hands and feet at the same time.
So they had these contraptions or traps, and they started
making them, Like drum companies like Ludwig started making traps
(11:39):
to just simulate things like this sounds. And you know,
these are early early talkies, so it's not like they
were going for absolute realism with like a barking dog
sound or a train whistle or a snore or a
cash register. But they would make these traps that were
close enough that people hearing this stuff for the first
time in a movie were like, oh my god.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Right, I never knew a dog actually sounded like that. Yeah.
There is this video of a guy named Nick White,
and he is a master of this. He has a
bunch of like vintage traps and he does live sound
effects along with like black and white talkie movies, silent movies. Sorry,
And there's a video of his called Vintage Sound Effect
(12:21):
Artist for Vintage Films. And it's amazing to watch him
do this in real time because, like you said, he's
doing stuff with his feet, he's doing stuff with his hands,
and then he's also probably got some sort of weird
whistle in his mouth at the same time.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Too. Yeah, and it's funny. Dave mentioned him later in
the article, but I was going to bring him up anyway.
This guy, Josh Harmon is a very fun Instagram account
to follow because he does it to old cartoons. Yeah,
and he has really blown up. He's like got fourn
of close to five million Instagram people now wow, and
has had like some famouses on there that take part.
(12:56):
And the delight of Josh Harmon stuff is not only
watching him squeeze a balloon to make it sound like
somebody like Porky Pig is trying to get through a door,
but the delight he gets at the end of the clip.
He just always lights up with this wonderful smile and
like one of my life goals is to sit in
and do a thing a sesson with do Harmon. Nice man,
(13:20):
I've asked, oh have you asked? Well, just on Instagram, like, hey,
I know I'm not Nick Jonas, but like I got
a few people who listen to me. Can I get
in there and and a bunch of stuff. You should know.
People are like, yeah, get Chuck, get Chuck, but he
you know it didn't get through.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
No, Well keep trying, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
I'm gonna maybe this will get to him.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
It could attention Josh Harmon do this.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
What about slapstick though I didn't know that even.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Uh yeah, the term is actually, you know, slapstick is
like physical silly comedy made up with pratfalls. And the
reason it's called slapstick is because there was a trap
that people used to use that was a slapstick. I
think I can imagine. It's like two wooden duck bills
that you smacked together, okay as a clacker. Yeah, and
(14:07):
they used that when somebody had a pratfall, like when
they tumbled and fell or something like that. They would
use this slapstick where the name came from. So now
you can go forth and tell everyone you ever meet
where the origin of the term slapstick is from.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
I love it. Uh maybe yeah. Here, let's finish up
with the Jazz Singer and then take a break. What
do you say?
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Mm hm?
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Well, the Jazz Singer, as we've mentioned in other episodes,
was the first sort of widely released successful talkie, right,
And I know we've talked about the vitaphone before, So
did we do one on silent movies or was it
just the birth of the movies or something like that.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
I don't know, I don't I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Well, Warner Brothers had developed something called the vitaphone, and
that was a separate machine that would sync the audio
along to the projector while there, while they're playing it.
And it was it was basically like a record they
recorded on Chalac discs like an LP. And once the
jazz singer came out, a whole new industry was born
from silent movies.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Right, like throwing a light switch, like silent movies were
out and talkies were in. Like, this is an enormous
innovation for sure. Yeah, so yeah, I say, that's a
great setup for where we are in history with the
sound effects.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
All right, so we're just gonna walk away. Clip clop,
clip clop clap.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Wait wait, oh no, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
You do a great machine gun and I have to
say you and Scott Ackerman both do great machine gun
sounds with your mouth.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
That is from years and years of playing with M
sixteen's in the woods.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
What is that horrible instinct that little boys have.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
I don't know, it's weird. I'm glad it It usually
gets it gets left behind or shed as you get
older typically, But.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Let's pick up that stick and go.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
See that was terrible.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
No, that was pretty good. That was a modified sixteen.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
All right? How about this bullet? Bullet bullet? Is it good?
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Did I ever tell you about the time I was
playing laser tag and if we didn't, It was like
at like ten thirty in the morning on a Tuesday
for some reason, and we didn't have enough of us
in a group to make it like even teams.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So the guy who worked there is other kid. He
played with us, and he caught me in a corner
and got me and then he just stood there and
shot me like every time, like my, my, youven get
out of there. Reset. He kept just shooting me and
killing me, and finally I shouted him like stop, and
he just laughed and walked away. But he killed me
(17:10):
probably like ten times in just you know however long
it took to reset.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Oh, since you mentioned that, and we're doing this today.
I had my very first laser tag at Ruby's birthday
party this summer. Nice. I had never done it before,
and I was the only adult in there with all
the kids. I was on the boys team, and I
was like listen, guys, they're gonna be running around and
screaming and shooting. I was like, everyone, find a position
(17:36):
and stay there, not probably higher ground. And I feel
kind of bad because we dominated, and I specifically dominated.
I beat it. It was like I had like ten
times the points is the next highest person.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
That's awesome against kids though.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah, so I just I got in a high spot
and was just picking them off as they came up.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
You're like Billy Madison, plane dodge in Billy Madison.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Oh. And not only did and I feel bad, I
got a lot of satisfaction.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Of all Batman. Yeah, it was fun, all bat instead
of bullet did you go laser laser laser?
Speaker 1 (18:12):
I did?
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Well, that's our laser tag. Anecdotes everybody, all right, we.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Got to talk about a legend named Jack Foley, and
this guy's story is pretty great.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
He was there at the beginning, like where we left
off with the release of The Jazz Singer in nineteen
twenty seven, so he was there at the transition to
talkies and he was doing all sorts of stuff. He
wrote a monthly column in Universal Studios like essentially Company magazine.
I guess, huh he did that for decades. He was
(18:44):
a great illustrator. He was an insert director, where like
if you showed one of the Three Stooges, like grabbing
a paintbrush out of a bucket, and you just saw
their hand, that's an insert, and then they would edit
that in later. The director who directed the whole thing,
like the Stooges probably didn't actually take that or get
that shot. Somebody like Jack Foley did, and somehow, some
(19:08):
way he ended up becoming a sound effects guy. I
don't know how he got his first chance. I think
he was just hired on as one of the people
doing it, and he became so good at it and
so legendary that still today anything that has to do
with creating sound effects in a studio is called folly.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah. His name became an adjective, a verb, and an
art form and a department yeah, which is I don't
know many people that can say that so. And I
also think he got hired because he was just around
doing all kinds of stuff. So it was one of
those things like Jack Foley can probably do it right.
So after the jazz singer, you know, everyone was like,
(19:50):
oh my gosh, this is the new thing we have
to have our talkie. And Universal had already gotten the
movie Showboat in the can as a silent film, right,
and they said, we want to change this to a talkie.
So Jack Foley goes over to Stage ten at Universal
Studios with an orchestra and started working his magic, which was,
you know, fairly limited stuff at first, like audience is
(20:12):
cheering and water and the sounds of the steamboat and
stuff like that. But you know, he's kind of saved
the day.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, And the thing is, so there's this live orchestra
playing along with this, and there's no retakes. You did
this whole movie in one take because it was being
recorded directly to that vitaphone record, right, So it went
out with the film like that was it. So this
orchestra's playing and he's making these sound effects as it's
(20:39):
happening on screen. It's just mind boggling what he was doing.
And he got really good at it. Apparently he could
do a reel of film which I saw ten minutes.
I think it probably varies a little bit, but somewhere
around there, let's say ten minutes of film, several scenes
he could do the sound effects live in one take.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, it's amazing that he started assembling his props and stuff,
and they got him a room and it became known
as Foley's room, and then eventually that would just become
the Foley Room on every studio. I don't know how
quickly they adopted his name as an adjective and a
verb and all that stuff, but I do know that
it was pre credit because he was not even getting
(21:23):
a credit for this, because there was no such thing
as a Bowley artist till after him.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
No, his first movie, like you said, was Steamboat, which
I think came out in nineteen twenty eight, and his
last movie was Spartakiss in nineteen sixty. He did scores,
probably hundreds and hundreds of movies and yeah, never once
got an on screen credit, which is nuts.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah, I mean the credit is named after him, like
he invented a credit.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah, for sure. By the way, I think it was
the early sixties and Desilu was the first studio outside
of Universal to call their folly room.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
A folly room. Amazing.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
What year was that, like sixty one or something like that, So.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Kind of right after it was done he got the honor.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, I guess that's amazing. Yeah, that does earns Man.
He really he was a class act.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
I did a shoot on the Lucy stage one time.
It was pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Oh yeah, is she buried there?
Speaker 1 (22:20):
No? No, no, it was just where they shot it.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Oh okay.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Like I would always ask anytime you're shooting at one
of the old Paramount Ladder Universal and I would always
kind of ask the old timers like, hey, what was here?
And you know, one time it was Happy Days, one
time it was Lucy. It was always kind of.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Neat right, Han's moment goes, I'm only thirty one years old.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
I had a couple of books ago, I think three
books ago. I read a really great dent Stanley Kubrick
book and he talked about this fact which was in Spartacus.
He didn't like the audio recording of the Roman Army marching,
so he was trying to bring in a big, fairly
expensive two day shoot to redo that. And Jack Bowley
(23:01):
was like, no, no, no, I think I've got this,
and on the spot went and got car keys and
was able to recreate the sound of like the armor
kind of clanking such that even Stanley Kubrick approved.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Of yeah, which is really saying something Yeah. But it
went from potentially flying back to Spain and re hiring
thousands of extras and reshooting these two days just for
the sound. To know, check out these keys. I just
saved your movie so much money. So just I mean
that was his last one too. That was a great
(23:34):
way to go out.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
I think, Oh, absolutely great movie. There are about one
hundred folly artists working today in the United States, which
you know, that's not a lot. I was sort of
surprised it was that high, given sort of the digital
takeover of a lot of things in Hollywood. But you know,
they call them artists because they are true artists. They
have their their obviously, you know mentioned earlier. They have
(23:56):
great ears. Apparently Dave found that some of them have
to wear ear plugs and movies and concerts and things
like that because their ears are just so kind of
tuned in and sensitive, right, And they had their own language.
You know, they don't say they may say clip clop
of a horse, but they definitely make words up as
sounds like you know, I need it to make a
(24:18):
scritchy sound, or it needs to sound poofy, and they
just sort of know what they mean when they're talking
to each other, right.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Oh, they definitely do. There's this really great profile in
the New Yorker where I think that hundred working fully
artists came from. One one of the fully artists profiled
said there was probably a hundred. But they, I mean
just the different words that they use for these sounds,
or like they they immediately know what the other one
is talking about. And just even more than that, they
(24:45):
can point to some chain or block and tackle just
hanging in a junk yard and say that'd make the
swaying chink sound or something like that, and they, sure
enough they could go up to it and make it
it sound exactly like what they were just describing. So
it's like a really niche group of people who work
(25:08):
in this really niche art. It's like you said before,
it's an art form and it's it's just fascinating to
read about, let alone talk about. I'm fascinated right now
if you can't tell.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Well, and just the the ability to disassociate sound from
object is key and just like super impressive, like you mentioned,
like to be able to look at a thing and
not see the thing, but see the sound you know,
or hear the sound I guess in your head. For sure,
potentially it's it's super cool. I love it. Like when
(25:41):
I was a kid, I remember seeing videos of fully
artists at work with a split screen of what's going
on on screen, and I was just like wrapped.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah, so that's that's how they do this. So usually
they work in pairs because there's like in a given scene,
there's probably frequently more going on than one person could
possibly handle. I know Jack Foley pioneered using canes with
shoes attached to the bottom to make multiple people walking
at the same time. It's a lot easier just have
(26:11):
another person in there, so you have like a fully
partner that you work with. And then there's the fully mixer.
And apparently they don't really see what the folly artists
are doing because they're keeping an ear out to see
if it matches what they think it should on the screen.
They're making a lot of the final decisions on how
it gets like what sound gets made, how it gets
(26:33):
sweetened or tightened or like tweaked or whatever. Yeah, and
then if you step back and watch, like like you said,
they're there in front of this giant screen or even
a TV sometimes and they're just acting along with the actor,
but making the sounds with stuff that you know, you
just would never say, like, yes, this is obviously. This
(26:55):
salary is obviously what you would use to make the
sound when somebody falls down and breaks a bit.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Yeah, they SELLAR snap is pretty good.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Yeah, it definitely works. It's an industry wide vegetable.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
It is. They start with a spotting session, which is
essentially just sitting down with the director and all the
sound department and fully department and just making a huge list.
You go through the movie and you just have a
huge list of every single scene, every single sound you
need to make. It's not the same thing as ADR,
which is additional dialogue recording, which is a lot of
(27:30):
times actors will have to come in. We had to
do this we're own TV show a little bit, Yeah,
and you have to restate your lines for one reason
or another and try and match it up and we're
watching the screen. But they do use the same technique
called looping, which is just playing the thing on a
loop over and over and over to try and sink
it as close as you can.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah, and it's amazing that anybody can do that because
it's really hard.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah what ADR fully ADR well both yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, adr.
I felt kind of dumb when I had to do it,
because it was, you know, you're trying to even though
we were bad actors, like we were trying to conveyce.
You're always trying to convey some sort of emotion with
everything that you're saying, even if it's just normal or
bored that is. And just to do that in a
(28:15):
room looking at yourself like with no experience, it was.
It was tough for me.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I blamed Brian for all of those.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Oh no, so you'll hear this, by the way.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
So oh yeah, I know I'm hoping you will.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Yeah, yeah, I knew it.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
One of the other very classic things you'll see in
a Foley studio is the floor will basically have like
a raised section and it'll be divided into like squares,
and one square will have like a concrete pad, another
square will have pebbles, another square won't have you know,
parquet fleets. Yeah, leaves, although I saw that they don't
usually use leaves. They use like old magnetic reel to
(28:53):
reel tape. Yeah yeah, and pull it out and crinkle
it and that makes a better leaf sound than a leaf.
Somebody figured that out along the way that leaf sounds
don't really make a good leaf sound. Isn't that crazy?
That's how manipulated we are when we watch movies. Uh.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
True. But I have seen them go in the field
for like forest walks and stuff. So there's a mix
of everything. There's not like just one way to do things.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
And they all know share stuff like whoever came up
with the celery is probably regarded as a as a
you know, a genius in the field for sure.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Yeah, I'm sure they're They're.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
Using carrots before that, right.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
I also saw there was in that New Yorker profile
one of the Folly artists talks about a Halloween mask
of the tin Man that got handed down from her
former Folly partner when he retired, and she was like,
nothing will ever make this sound. It's like a shit
like it's described as a yawning chit sound. I can't
(29:50):
even wrap my mind around that.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
But what sound is it supposed to be.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
A yawning chill sound? I don't know. I think it used.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
It's like, what's it used for?
Speaker 2 (29:58):
I don't know. Okay, if you wait a little bit,
I can look her up and call and ask, oh.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
No, no, no, that's all right. I just wondered if
you were like, and that's the sound of a pot
going on a stove.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
How about this, Let's edit this in the sound of
a pot going on the stove.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Okay, perfect, But she was she.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Was pointing out like I think they even said, like
she ordered a new one online and it came and
she was like, this doesn't sound anything like it. It's
made of different materials, so like it's so nuanced. I
saw a quote from David Fincher, the director, who is
like a huge fan of foli art artists, and he
(30:36):
basically was like, where we're looking at like the like
a scene of some people having a meeting in a
lawyer's office, and he's like, what is the what does
the nauga hide or the leather on the sofa sound like?
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah, like is it is it fake? Like is this
a strip mall lawyer's office or is it like a
really well healed lawyer's office, so it's real leather Like
that kind of attention to detail, Yeah, fully artists make
like that's what makes a movie like engrossing or you know,
at the very least extremely realistic, like that level of
(31:12):
attention to detail.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah, or if you're not paying attention to detail like that,
it makes something stand out as and you may not
even recognize it, but subconsciously it may just a sound
may sit wrong if they don't do it right.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Yeah, like if somebody sits on a leather couch and
it makes a yawning sound, right, you're gonna be like,
what was that?
Speaker 1 (31:32):
That's a tidman helmet? Right.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
You wouldn't believe them if they told you that's right.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
So the you know, the Fuly stage is amazing. They
have that floor. It's just riddled with props and weird
things that they all. They don't call it by the thing,
you know, they call it by the sound it makes.
Like you don't say give me those coconuts, you say
give me the hoofs, although they don't use coconuts. It's
a little bit of a money python reference there. But yeah,
it's a fun looking room. Like I encourage everyone to go,
(31:59):
like see some like YouTube video of a Folly artist
and work in their little kind of cool air conditioned
dark room. There's water like that. There's usually like a bathtub,
there's usually a working toilet, uh, and just all manner
of props that people.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Use you wanted to take a break and come back
and talk a little more about sound effects.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Let's do it. Show me open my door.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
And then look out, Chuck grown out again.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
All right, So Dave kind of dug up some fun,
classic uh folly tricks from famous movies, and we're gonna
talk about those and more because we're going to get
into Star Wars as well, because everyone loves talking about
Star Wars.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Well, the guy who was the fully artist and I
guess sound designer for Star Wars, Ben Burt, just changed
the industry from what I could tell. He's a really
interesting creative guy.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Yeah, we talked about him before he was the Wilhelm
Scream guy.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Yes, yes, did you see the Wilhelm Scream thing I sent?
Speaker 1 (33:26):
I did not?
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Oh? Got I know the story of the Wilhelm Scream.
You want to hear it?
Speaker 1 (33:31):
We did a whole episode on it, didn't we.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
No, we just mentioned it and then Jerry put the
wrong one in.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Oh, I thought we did a whole short stuff on it.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
On the Wilhelm Scream. I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
I thought we did well. Either way, Just go ahead.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
All right, if we have then we'll edit this part out.
But Essentially, the Wilhelm Scream was a scream that they
they think was recorded by a guy named chev Woolley,
who was an actor and musician who's known for the
song people Eater. He's the guy who's saying that, And
it was in a movie called Distant Drums. And I
think we can play the Wilhelm scream right here, right.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
But I mean I thought we could the first time,
and it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Well, let's try again. So this is what we're talking about.
This is the very famous Wilhelm scream. Okay, so apparently
Shebb Woolley recorded that for Distant Drums, but it didn't
become kind of, I guess a thing or iconic or
well used two until two years later there was a
movie called The Charge at Feather River and a character
(34:34):
named Private Willhelm gets shot in the leg by an arrow,
an he screams the Wilhelm scream. Still wasn't called the
Wilhelm scream until Ben Burt came along for Star Wars
and he'd seen just tons of Westerns as a kid,
and that Wilhelm scream showed up in almost all of them.
So he sought out that scream and found it in
(34:56):
the charge at feather River Sound Library and used it.
The first time it shows up is when Luke shoots
a stormtrooper and the stormtrooper falls off of something or
other I can't remember where exactly, and he adopted as
a signature sound, and it just became kind of an
iconic in joke among sound editors since then.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah, you know, it may have been movie crush. That
makes sense where I covered that. Yeah, totally makes sense.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
And I think it was all that's interesting. So it's
been in over four hundred films.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Amazing. Yeah, the ET sound. They needed ET to sound
a certain way when Et walked around, because they needed
him to sound like an ET but also not be
like gross. They wanted people to like ET, so they
used like jello wrapped in a damp T shirt and
raw liver apparently just for this sort of squishy walking sounds.
(35:49):
That's pretty good one.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yikes, what about Titanic? This is a good one.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
No spoilers are going to spoil the end of Titanic.
Oh come on, so you can dial out now if
you want to. But at the end of Titanic, Kate
Winslet is floating on a door or a piece of
wood or something. I think it's a door and she's
freezing cold, and they used apparently frozen lettuce to recreate
her the sound of her hair movie.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah, which was perfect because I remember that sound effect.
I don't think I was like that crispy hair sounds
crazy at the time, but when I read about it,
I remember that it made some sort of impact on me. Yeah,
to prevent anybody from emailing in. Apparently it's not a door.
Everybody says it's a door, but some people on Reddit
found the piece of the staircase that it was taken from,
(36:39):
So James Cameron's film was so accurate that you could
determine that she was floating on a piece of staircase
that is shown earlier in The Titanic before it sinks.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
I think it was a door.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
That's fine. I just wanted I knew somebody who's going
to email in, and I wanted to burst their bubble
fight club.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
You know, if you've ever heard of fistfight in real life,
A I'm sorry, because that's a really dumb thing to do,
is to punch somebody. But a punch to somebody's face
in real life, to their body doesn't sound anything like
it sounds in the movies. It's a fairly boring sound,
so they need to recreate that obviously, And a lot
(37:17):
of times they're punching you know, raw meat and things
like that and adding extra like bass and kind of
tweak it and posts. But apparently in Fight Club, chicken
carcasses were pounded with baseball bats along with the sounds
of cracking walnuts. Yes, pretty good.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
There's this movie called Berbery in sound studio back in
twenty twelve. Did you see it?
Speaker 1 (37:39):
I've never heard of it.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
It was a little art house movie the what's the
British actor the short British actor with classes Toby somebody?
He played Capoti Jiman Capodi?
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Oh yeah, Toby Jones.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Maybe, yes, you're right. So Toby Jones is in it
and he's a folly artist who starts to descend into
madness and essentially the entire movie takes place on a
fully studiente and there's parts where they're stabbing a melon
to make the sound of the person on screen getting stabbed.
And the folly artists who actually worked on that movie
(38:12):
said that they had to use wet cloth and wood
to make the sound of the folly artist on the
screen stabbing the water melon to make the sound of
the person on their screen getting stabbed with a knife.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
I think I do remember that movie. I don't think
I saw it, but I remember that happening.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
It's worth seeing. It's a slow burn that, possibly, depending
on your view, never actually ignites. Okay, but it's an
interesting movie. He does a good job.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
They should put that on the poster. Possibly never ignites Josh.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Clark right, like, this is the best we could get.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Melons are useful, use a lot of melons for a
lot of things. A hand inside of melon apparently was
on that first dinosaur egg hatches sorry spoiler alert in
Jurassic Park. It was a hand inside of the melon
combined with the cracking of an ice cream cone.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Very nice. I saw Raiders of the Lost Art that
famous bowlder rolling at Indy in the beginning of the
movie first movie. Yeah, it was a car with no
motor being rolled down a hill.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Oh, okay, and that was also Ben Burt Oh was it?
Speaker 2 (39:20):
That makes sense?
Speaker 1 (39:21):
Yeah? He did all the Internet Jones movies. He did
et He was clearly a Spielberg Lucas guy.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yeah he was. He was good and probably still is
he still working?
Speaker 1 (39:32):
I bet he is. He's in his midish seventies, so
I bet he's still out there.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Okay, there we go.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
I like to think he is. Should we talk about
some of those Star Wars sounds too while we're here?
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
The blaster Star Wars blaster, very very legendary film sci
fi sound. He and you'll see a lot of sound
people that just like kind of always carry around their
recording device. I don't know if they do that kind
of stuff on phones now, just to say like hey,
this like just to pick up the sound. But back Ben,
for Ben Bird, it was a Nagra reel to real recorder,
(40:03):
and he was on he was just collecting sounds all
over the place to potentially use for Star Wars. And
that's kind of the fun thing, is just looking around
the world and like just collecting noises and say, you know,
this might come in handy later. You never know, right,
And they were in the Pocono's and he went to
he saw a radio tower with those big, taut, big
(40:24):
bundled wire support cables and he was like, I wonder
what that sounds like when I hit it. He hit
it with a rock and it made that sound, and
then he did it at another tower, a radio tower
in the Mahave Desert, and combine those tweaked him a
little bit, and that's how you get that laser blast,
which you two can make. If you ever see one
of those really really taught cables, have you hit that
(40:44):
thing with something metal, it'll go cute.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Yeah, there's a bunch of different laser blasts in Star Wars,
but the ones that were made with that sound effector
once you know that, you can you can really clearly
hear it. It's perfect.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah, I think it's the blaster sound.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Well, you mean Han Solo's blaster.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, I mean the blaster is just a type of gun.
I mean, we're probably gonna get in big trouble from
Star Wars people. But when they put laser sound, I
was like, oh, you can't say that, dude, it's a blaster.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Let's move on to the tie fighters.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
How about that, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
Those are actually so the very famous.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Whaw hey, that's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Thanks. Those are African elephants that are roaring, layered over
one another and then distorted so that it doesn't sound
like elephants. But when you hear that and you go
listen to the tie fighters sound being made, You'll say, yeah,
that's an elephant.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
I think you do a Chewbacca too, don't you know?
I thought you used to do that.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Now my Chewbacca sounds like this wall, wall wall, It's
like a nitross.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
I could have sworn it was you that did a
pretty good Chewbacca, but maybe not. But apparently Chewbacca was
made by just combining a bunch of different animals and
again layering them on top of one another, a walrus,
a badger, and a bear at the very least. And
then we got to mention R two D two because
that's where ben Bert brings in. And you know, a
(42:10):
big change in the industry is when the synthesizer, especially
the mogue was invented, because not only could you make
all sorts of like cool space ag music for soundtracks,
you could also make just bleeps and bloops, which is
what he did. He had a Coorg synthesizer, a very
early Chorg, and did these you know, beeps and boops
for R two D two. And you know, you think,
(42:31):
all right, that's great, big deal. But the genius of
it is that he somehow creates emotion and conveys emotion
through these beeps and boops from a little droid with
a synthesizer. Yeah, that's it's magic.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
That's the reason fully artists are still around because you
can't you just can't do that with stock stuff from
a sound library.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah, or you could tell when it's done that way
for sure.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
There you go. So one other thing we should probably
touch on real quicker nature documentaries.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Yeah, to get ready to be disappointed.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah, they get a lot of guf for basically fudging stuff,
and they are legendary for fudging stuff like apparently they'll
use semi domesticated animals that they rent to film, you know,
chasing a lamb around or something like that. But one
of the things they're very frequently criticized on is using
sound effects and really kind of going overboard with them.
(43:28):
But by the nature of what they're making, they have
to use sound effects to begin with.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Yeah, I mean a lot of this stuff is filmed
on very long lenses from very far away. If you're
filming a lion tracking down an antelope and killing it,
you're not like right up on it, you know, so
you don't have the sound to begin with. Maybe they
bring some people out there with those long distance mics
to record some stuff, but then there's just so much
ambient sound they probably can't use it. So generally, if
(43:59):
you see like you know, a Planet Earth discovery documentary,
these the sound department is handed kind of like a
silent film almost, and they use you know, it's not
like they gotta have to use like real animal calls
for the real animals. They're not just like, hey, let's
make this lion sound kind of like different. So they
(44:19):
want accuracy there for sure. But you know when you
see a mushroom growing in a time lapse, they're just
adding all those sounds of like a mushroom stretching its
arms out. Yees, mushroom doesn't have arms its head.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Sure, I mean, lean in and put your ear to
a mushroom as it's growing, and you're not going to
hear anything. It doesn't make a sound.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Nope.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Another one they get accused of is making the northern
lights make a sound. Yeah, those don't make a sound.
There's just all sorts of like if you stop and
think about it, like a close up of a spider
walking on a leaf, it wouldn't make a sound, but
it would look weird to not have a sound, or
at the very least it looks better. That makes the
whole thing better too. Sound, I don't really I mean,
(45:01):
nature documentaries are so fudged to begin with that I
don't really have a problem with that.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
The sound, Yeah, I don't have a problem. And I
think if someone like you said, if you sat someone
down and showed them just the realistic thing with just
the realistic sound, it's probably not nearly as compelling.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
They'd be like, can I leave now you anything else?
Speaker 1 (45:24):
Yeah, one last thing, just sort of on the note
of using things like pro tools. I mentioned earlier that
it was was kind of budget related, and obviously big
movies can just afford to do whatever they want in
terms of that kind of thing. But even then, the
sound line items are often just a very small part
of the budget. You know, it kind of depends, but
you know, when you budget out a movie or a
(45:45):
TV show or commercial or anything, you kind of have
a general template to work for, like we're going to
allocate this percentage for this, this percentage for this camera
department's going to get probably something like this, and sound
is always like maybe ten percent or so, and a
lot of times. That can include the rights to play
soundtrack stuff. And you know, it depends on the movie.
If it's like Dazed and Confused or something like that,
(46:07):
there's really music reliant. You know, you're gonna have to
spend a lot of money on that, So you may
you may look at the post production sound and be like,
I'm sorry, you have very little to work with. So
that's where you're gonna get stuff like pulled from libraries
a little more. When you get these big, big movies,
that's when they can afford to bring into folly artists
and the whole teams. And that's why this sound is
(46:27):
always really awesome and that's why they highlight it at
the Academy Awards.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
Yes. Nice. Yeah, So go forth and watch movies and
listen out for sounds and you'll probably be amazed here
or there.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Yeah, but don't get so caught up in that. Like
I wonder if fully artists can even watch movies I
know and enjoy them.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
I feel so bad for people who can't watch movies,
who can't enjoy food because they're chefs or something like that.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Yeah, yeah, totally can't.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Enjoy simple pleasures in life because they know too much
about it, you know, can't enjoy maloney or sausage.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yeah, I say here's a new stuff you should know
T shirt. We have a new T shirt seller.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Right, Yeah, it's on Cotton Bureau, our new merch merchant.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Yeah. We've never put a lot of effort into merch,
but we always hear people asking, So Cotton Bureau stuff
you should know. You can find our merch now. And
I think a new T shirt should be stay dumb,
Enjoy Things.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Oh that's a good one. Yeah, that's a great one.
All right, Well let's have Aaron Cooper get on it,
because I say, I think two thirds of our shirts
in our merch store from Aaron Cooper because he's really
good at it.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
Yeah, and State of enjoy Things is perfect to promote
a show that's all about trying to make people smarter precisely.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
Yeah, I wonder if we can get his shirt that says.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
How would you spell that?
Speaker 2 (47:43):
I don't know. I'm going to leave that to Aaron Cooper.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Well, since we said Aaron Cooper's name at least two times,
I think maybe three, we've unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
You don't want to say it three times because he'll
be right behind you. All right, here we go from Stephanie,
and I feel bad about this because I even knew this. Hey, guys,
thanks for the great episode about the militarization of the police.
I'm truly grateful for the decade of learning since I've
been listening. One of you commented, I think it was me,
probably that you were surprised to read about the police
(48:16):
in teen Vogue. I thought you might be interested to
know that teen Bogue is pretty well known for serious
journalism and being an example for taking young women and
girls seriously. I knew that, and we've even talked about
this before, and so I don't know why it's like, oh,
than Vogue.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
No, it was me, was it? It was one hundred
percent of me.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
Oh I thought it was me. Well, I'll throw myself
on that grenade. That's along with you. That's all right,
But she says, here's an article from Jezebel by Julian
Escabato Shepherd. If you're shocked teen Bogue is great, you're
not paying attention. I imagine you may get other emails like this,
although I may be the first, since I was up
(48:53):
crazy early and listened right away. Thanks and have a
great day, and that is from Stephanie.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Thanks Stephanie. Those are the correct that we love to
get where it's very gentle, but also like you guys,
come on, you know yeah, if you can balance those
two things, you've come up with a great correction email
as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
If you want to be like Stephanie and send us
a correction or just an email say hi or whatever,
you can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know. I got nothing.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Hey, that was a sound effect in and of itself.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I guess I don't know if it really qualifies, but
I appreciate the support. Chuck.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
It was Josh introing the show as he falls off
of a cliff.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
You know, it's Josh in space.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah that doo.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, the cliff works too.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I just I like you in space better than dying.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Thank you. I appreciate that. But I think that really
goes to illustrate just how versatile sound effects can be.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Yeah, I'm excited about this one.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I am too. This was a Dave joint. He helps
us with this, and I knew nothing about this stuff.
I mean, I knew that the people who make this
are often called fully artists when they do a specific
kind of thing, but just like the little details and everything,
and it was all new to me and it was
all super interesting. So I'm psyched to buy this one too.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, me too. So what we're talking about is sound effects.
If you haven't gathered that by now. And you know,
I never assume what people know about movie making because
I worked in that field for a little while and
you and I did a TV show, like you know
some stuff about it. But I never assume that people
know things or not. So we should say right out
(01:32):
of the gate, when you're watching a movie, you're watching
a TV show or something like that. And also this
stuff is for animation and video games and all that stuff,
but we're mainly talking about, you know, live action stuff.
When you see a car drive down the road or
a couple sitting in a restaurant having a conversation and
you hear all the people in the background and you
hear that car drive down the road or anything you
(01:54):
hear a door shut, footsteps. All of that stuff is
created in post production, either by a person doing it
a folly artist, which we're going to talk a lot about,
or it might be from a sound catalog like where
you have all kinds of recordings you can pull from right,
car door shut stuff like that, or sometimes you know
that stuff now obviously is created through the wizardry of computering.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, but there's a surprising craft that's still left that
has not been pushed out by computers. Yet that seems
like this sort of happened years ago. But the work
that the folly artists do is so intricate and so
well done. Yeah, computers just can't replicate it yet, Like, yeah,
they there's a car door. Sound sounds good, but it
(02:41):
just doesn't quite work. And the reason why, from what
I saw all the explanations I saw, basically said, fully
artists are there sound actors, so they're acting along with
the actors on screen to make the sounds that you
know and love and actually don't even notice, but you
would notice. So if they weren't there or they were.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Off, yeah, for sure. And two more quick points for me.
Sound is often overlooked I think by the general public
in a movie or TV show for sure, And even
as you've seen my friend on actual sets, it's half
the thing is what you're hearing. The other half is
what you're seeing. But the sound department, every sound department
(03:23):
I've ever worked with, is always like just they're shoved
to the side, and you know, you know, they make
room for the camera and everything in the lighting, and
then there's a boom person that's like, oh, don't worry
about me. Like I also have to stand in this room. Yeah,
do like half the sound they're always you know, just
shoved off to the side, which is incredible that it's
still sort of like that. And also, you know, getting
(03:45):
back to what I said before about how every sound
you hear basically that is not dialogue or music like
soundtrack stuff or unless it's diegetic sound actually screws things
up on recording out in the world. Like that's what
they try to shoot as much as they can on
a stage, because if you're out on the street, you
often hear the term houlter sound because there's a lawn
(04:07):
mower and they may add a lot more later to
make something more real, but they don't want the lawn
mower that's actually there or the plane flying over. They
could add all of that stuff, the birds chirping. They
add all that stuff later to make it real, but
you can't have any of that on the day while
you're shooting, so you're always holding for sound, waiting for
the car or the train or the leaf blower. And
(04:28):
that's why they shoot like restaurants seems like completely silent.
Everybody is miming talking in the background, and it's really weird.
When you see like a clip of it.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Oh, it's definitely where. It's also weird to be like
in the middle of it, trying to act when everybody
around you in the restaurant is silently miming.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, and it's also hard. I did an extra thing
or two. That's hard to do.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah, for sure, I'm sure those are two sides of
the same coin. Yeah, so those are two great quick
points seven quick points from me. That's about how Oh
so you said a word back there a minute ago,
diagetic and that stood out to me, like what And
the reason why I didn't stop you and say, what
(05:11):
are you talking about, Chuck, is because I already know
what it means, so I feel like I should explain it.
Diegetic sound is the sound inside the movie's world. So
if you were one of the characters or the extras
or anybody in that movie, you would hear these sounds
like that lawn mower, that car driving by, the machine gun.
You know it's from the car driving by. That's my
(05:34):
best one.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah. I mean a lot of times you hear it
in terms of music, like when they're playing something in
the car that they're hearing. Sure, and then a very
common sort of thing to do is then that becomes
the soundtrack. It like kind of changes the tone a
little bit. You know, yeah, it's always great.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
But so that would be diegetic music. But like the
score that's just going along with it, that would be
non diegetic because the characters aren't hearing that same with narration.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, unless it's like a naked gun kind of thing,
and then they might like the strings will swell. Then
soon it will be like did you hear that?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Has Ruby taken you to the new Naked Gun?
Speaker 1 (06:09):
I took myself Scotty and.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
I went, oh, really, how was it?
Speaker 1 (06:12):
It's very very very funny.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Really, So do you know Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson
are a couple? Now?
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I wondered about that because they're both people at a
certain stage in life that are without their partners and
for very different reasons. But I kind of was like,
you know that, I kind of hoped they would get together.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Well they did, Buddy, your loves came true.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
She's very funny in it. I don't know if it's
still out, but I highly recommend seeing it in a
theater with laughing with a group of people. Okay, good
to know, but it's probably too late for that.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
So so you talked about how you hold for lawnmower
and all that, and that that stuff's added on later.
I think something like ninety percent. I've actually seen higher
than that of the sound you hear in the film
that's not dialogue or music is added later on and
post production. That's how important this stuff is. And like
you said, though, it just it gets treated like a
(07:06):
second class citizen despite how hard they work. And I
think if we get across anything in this episode, it
should be how hard and creative the people who make
sound effects are.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, for sure. And again we're going to get into
the foly stuff and mention things like sound banks of
doors shutting and wind blowing and all that stuff that
you can pull from. But a lot of times you
have sound designers that go out and make their own
recordings of that stuff. They just that they don't want
the universal catalog of car doors shutting. They want to
(07:40):
get their own, maybe it's a specific car. In fact,
that's that's what they should be doing, because card doors
are very specific the sound they make.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
So they'll go out in the field.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
There's a whole movie about that blow up. I'm Sorry.
Blowout with John Travolta, where he played a guy that
captures the sound of a car crash that ends up
being very you know, murderous.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, yeah, that was actually a pretty good movie. Great,
this is a classic, right, don't people consider a classic?
There's also so in addition to card or shutting, like
the vehicles themselves, the sounds they make those are often
like from a sound library, but I've also seen that
they'll be layered. They'll like add certain details sometimes later
(08:21):
on onto the sound library file called sweetening, And that's
that seems to be a pretty common thing. Even if
you're taking stuff that you're making out in the field yourself,
or you're making in the studio as you're watching the clip,
you'll probably still layer all that stuff together to get
like the most realistic, richest possible sound.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, they get really into it. It's a good nerdy
sort of line of work. You gotta have a good ear,
that's for sure. You're because you're recreating you know, punches
and slaps and every gunshot that you hear in every
movie is not what you hear on set obviously, and
then of course you know this is all stuff done.
It's like real sound effects. A lot of the things
(09:04):
that are created to be a computer are, but not
all of them are things that don't exist. You know,
like if you're going to do like a movie set
in out of Space, you're going to be making up
a lot of brand new sounds that have never been
made before.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, they seem to love that stuff because they have,
like Carte Blanc, to just go nuts and get creative.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Basically it's awesome.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Another one that gets left out that sounds really boring
but apparently it's really hard. Or footsteps. I'm sure there's
tons of sound effects of footsteps in libraries, but those
don't work from what I've seen, from what I've read
there essentially there because somebody put them there. People don't
use them. You have to make the footsteps based on
(09:48):
the actor and how they're moving, and not just in
sync with them. But a good folly artist will take
into account the weight, the height, the gait. Are they shuffle,
are they high stepping or they goose stepping. They're like,
they take all this stuff into account to make a
specific kind of walk or footfall for a particular actor.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Yeah, and a lot of times the stuff is dictated
by budget. Obviously, folly artists don't come cheap. So if
you've ever been watching a low budget movie and the
footsteps sounded kind of corny, it's probably because they're pulling
from a library.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Probably they're trying their best.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
They're doing their best. They don't have the kind of
dough for that, so you know, it all just depends.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
So I say, do you want to go back to
the beginning of all.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
This, yeah, which is surprisingly silent movies, right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Well, apparently because you further back than that to vaudeville
before there were even movies, people would play along on
stage to make sound effects with vaudeville act so it
was a pretty brainless transition from vaudeville stages to the
stage underneath a movie, and it was just somebody playing
(10:59):
a lot I think to start with like drums and
like maybe some clackers and a few different things. But
it very quickly took off as like a cottage industry
to make props for people who did this live to use.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, props or traps traps baby short for contraption, And
a lot of times it was percussionists, even if they
weren't literally playing drums, because percussionists are just good at
doing multiple things with hands and feet at the same time.
So they had these contraptions or traps, and they started
making them, Like drum companies like Ludwig started making traps
(11:39):
to just simulate things like this sounds. And you know,
these are early early talkies, so it's not like they
were going for absolute realism with like a barking dog
sound or a train whistle or a snore or a
cash register. But they would make these traps that were
close enough that people hearing this stuff for the first
time in a movie were like, oh my god.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Right, I never knew a dog actually sounded like that. Yeah.
There is this video of a guy named Nick White,
and he is a master of this. He has a
bunch of like vintage traps and he does live sound
effects along with like black and white talkie movies, silent movies. Sorry,
And there's a video of his called Vintage Sound Effect
(12:21):
Artist for Vintage Films. And it's amazing to watch him
do this in real time because, like you said, he's
doing stuff with his feet, he's doing stuff with his hands,
and then he's also probably got some sort of weird
whistle in his mouth at the same time.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Too. Yeah, and it's funny. Dave mentioned him later in
the article, but I was going to bring him up anyway.
This guy, Josh Harmon is a very fun Instagram account
to follow because he does it to old cartoons. Yeah,
and he has really blown up. He's like got fourn
of close to five million Instagram people now wow, and
has had like some famouses on there that take part.
(12:56):
And the delight of Josh Harmon stuff is not only
watching him squeeze a balloon to make it sound like
somebody like Porky Pig is trying to get through a door,
but the delight he gets at the end of the clip.
He just always lights up with this wonderful smile and
like one of my life goals is to sit in
and do a thing a sesson with do Harmon. Nice man,
(13:20):
I've asked, oh have you asked? Well, just on Instagram, like, hey,
I know I'm not Nick Jonas, but like I got
a few people who listen to me. Can I get
in there and and a bunch of stuff. You should know.
People are like, yeah, get Chuck, get Chuck, but he
you know it didn't get through.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
No, Well keep trying, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
I'm gonna maybe this will get to him.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
It could attention Josh Harmon do this.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
What about slapstick though I didn't know that even.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Uh yeah, the term is actually, you know, slapstick is
like physical silly comedy made up with pratfalls. And the
reason it's called slapstick is because there was a trap
that people used to use that was a slapstick. I
think I can imagine. It's like two wooden duck bills
that you smacked together, okay as a clacker. Yeah, and
(14:07):
they used that when somebody had a pratfall, like when
they tumbled and fell or something like that. They would
use this slapstick where the name came from. So now
you can go forth and tell everyone you ever meet
where the origin of the term slapstick is from.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
I love it. Uh maybe yeah. Here, let's finish up
with the Jazz Singer and then take a break. What
do you say?
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Mm hm?
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Well, the Jazz Singer, as we've mentioned in other episodes,
was the first sort of widely released successful talkie, right,
And I know we've talked about the vitaphone before, So
did we do one on silent movies or was it
just the birth of the movies or something like that.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
I don't know, I don't I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Well, Warner Brothers had developed something called the vitaphone, and
that was a separate machine that would sync the audio
along to the projector while there, while they're playing it.
And it was it was basically like a record they
recorded on Chalac discs like an LP. And once the
jazz singer came out, a whole new industry was born
from silent movies.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Right, like throwing a light switch, like silent movies were
out and talkies were in. Like, this is an enormous
innovation for sure. Yeah, so yeah, I say, that's a
great setup for where we are in history with the
sound effects.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
All right, so we're just gonna walk away. Clip clop,
clip clop clap.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Wait wait, oh no, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
You do a great machine gun and I have to
say you and Scott Ackerman both do great machine gun
sounds with your mouth.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
That is from years and years of playing with M
sixteen's in the woods.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
What is that horrible instinct that little boys have.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
I don't know, it's weird. I'm glad it It usually
gets it gets left behind or shed as you get
older typically, But.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Let's pick up that stick and go.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
See that was terrible.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
No, that was pretty good. That was a modified sixteen.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
All right? How about this bullet? Bullet bullet? Is it good?
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Did I ever tell you about the time I was
playing laser tag and if we didn't, It was like
at like ten thirty in the morning on a Tuesday
for some reason, and we didn't have enough of us
in a group to make it like even teams.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So the guy who worked there is other kid. He
played with us, and he caught me in a corner
and got me and then he just stood there and
shot me like every time, like my, my, youven get
out of there. Reset. He kept just shooting me and
killing me, and finally I shouted him like stop, and
he just laughed and walked away. But he killed me
(17:10):
probably like ten times in just you know however long
it took to reset.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Oh, since you mentioned that, and we're doing this today.
I had my very first laser tag at Ruby's birthday
party this summer. Nice. I had never done it before,
and I was the only adult in there with all
the kids. I was on the boys team, and I
was like listen, guys, they're gonna be running around and
screaming and shooting. I was like, everyone, find a position
(17:36):
and stay there, not probably higher ground. And I feel
kind of bad because we dominated, and I specifically dominated.
I beat it. It was like I had like ten
times the points is the next highest person.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
That's awesome against kids though.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah, so I just I got in a high spot
and was just picking them off as they came up.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
You're like Billy Madison, plane dodge in Billy Madison.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Oh. And not only did and I feel bad, I
got a lot of satisfaction.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Of all Batman. Yeah, it was fun, all bat instead
of bullet did you go laser laser laser?
Speaker 1 (18:12):
I did?
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Well, that's our laser tag. Anecdotes everybody, all right, we.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Got to talk about a legend named Jack Foley, and
this guy's story is pretty great.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
He was there at the beginning, like where we left
off with the release of The Jazz Singer in nineteen
twenty seven, so he was there at the transition to
talkies and he was doing all sorts of stuff. He
wrote a monthly column in Universal Studios like essentially Company magazine.
I guess, huh he did that for decades. He was
(18:44):
a great illustrator. He was an insert director, where like
if you showed one of the Three Stooges, like grabbing
a paintbrush out of a bucket, and you just saw
their hand, that's an insert, and then they would edit
that in later. The director who directed the whole thing,
like the Stooges probably didn't actually take that or get
that shot. Somebody like Jack Foley did, and somehow, some
(19:08):
way he ended up becoming a sound effects guy. I
don't know how he got his first chance. I think
he was just hired on as one of the people
doing it, and he became so good at it and
so legendary that still today anything that has to do
with creating sound effects in a studio is called folly.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah. His name became an adjective, a verb, and an
art form and a department yeah, which is I don't
know many people that can say that so. And I
also think he got hired because he was just around
doing all kinds of stuff. So it was one of
those things like Jack Foley can probably do it right.
So after the jazz singer, you know, everyone was like,
(19:50):
oh my gosh, this is the new thing we have
to have our talkie. And Universal had already gotten the
movie Showboat in the can as a silent film, right,
and they said, we want to change this to a talkie.
So Jack Foley goes over to Stage ten at Universal
Studios with an orchestra and started working his magic, which was,
you know, fairly limited stuff at first, like audience is
(20:12):
cheering and water and the sounds of the steamboat and
stuff like that. But you know, he's kind of saved
the day.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, And the thing is, so there's this live orchestra
playing along with this, and there's no retakes. You did
this whole movie in one take because it was being
recorded directly to that vitaphone record, right, So it went
out with the film like that was it. So this
orchestra's playing and he's making these sound effects as it's
(20:39):
happening on screen. It's just mind boggling what he was doing.
And he got really good at it. Apparently he could
do a reel of film which I saw ten minutes.
I think it probably varies a little bit, but somewhere
around there, let's say ten minutes of film, several scenes
he could do the sound effects live in one take.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, it's amazing that he started assembling his props and stuff,
and they got him a room and it became known
as Foley's room, and then eventually that would just become
the Foley Room on every studio. I don't know how
quickly they adopted his name as an adjective and a
verb and all that stuff, but I do know that
it was pre credit because he was not even getting
(21:23):
a credit for this, because there was no such thing
as a Bowley artist till after him.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
No, his first movie, like you said, was Steamboat, which
I think came out in nineteen twenty eight, and his
last movie was Spartakiss in nineteen sixty. He did scores,
probably hundreds and hundreds of movies and yeah, never once
got an on screen credit, which is nuts.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah, I mean the credit is named after him, like
he invented a credit.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah, for sure. By the way, I think it was
the early sixties and Desilu was the first studio outside
of Universal to call their folly room.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
A folly room. Amazing.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
What year was that, like sixty one or something like that, So.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Kind of right after it was done he got the honor.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, I guess that's amazing. Yeah, that does earns Man.
He really he was a class act.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
I did a shoot on the Lucy stage one time.
It was pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Oh yeah, is she buried there?
Speaker 1 (22:20):
No? No, no, it was just where they shot it.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Oh okay.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Like I would always ask anytime you're shooting at one
of the old Paramount Ladder Universal and I would always
kind of ask the old timers like, hey, what was here?
And you know, one time it was Happy Days, one
time it was Lucy. It was always kind of.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Neat right, Han's moment goes, I'm only thirty one years old.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
I had a couple of books ago, I think three
books ago. I read a really great dent Stanley Kubrick
book and he talked about this fact which was in Spartacus.
He didn't like the audio recording of the Roman Army marching,
so he was trying to bring in a big, fairly
expensive two day shoot to redo that. And Jack Bowley
(23:01):
was like, no, no, no, I think I've got this,
and on the spot went and got car keys and
was able to recreate the sound of like the armor
kind of clanking such that even Stanley Kubrick approved.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Of yeah, which is really saying something Yeah. But it
went from potentially flying back to Spain and re hiring
thousands of extras and reshooting these two days just for
the sound. To know, check out these keys. I just
saved your movie so much money. So just I mean
that was his last one too. That was a great
(23:34):
way to go out.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
I think, Oh, absolutely great movie. There are about one
hundred folly artists working today in the United States, which
you know, that's not a lot. I was sort of
surprised it was that high, given sort of the digital
takeover of a lot of things in Hollywood. But you know,
they call them artists because they are true artists. They
have their their obviously, you know mentioned earlier. They have
(23:56):
great ears. Apparently Dave found that some of them have
to wear ear plugs and movies and concerts and things
like that because their ears are just so kind of
tuned in and sensitive, right, And they had their own language.
You know, they don't say they may say clip clop
of a horse, but they definitely make words up as
sounds like you know, I need it to make a
(24:18):
scritchy sound, or it needs to sound poofy, and they
just sort of know what they mean when they're talking
to each other, right.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Oh, they definitely do. There's this really great profile in
the New Yorker where I think that hundred working fully
artists came from. One one of the fully artists profiled
said there was probably a hundred. But they, I mean
just the different words that they use for these sounds,
or like they they immediately know what the other one
is talking about. And just even more than that, they
(24:45):
can point to some chain or block and tackle just
hanging in a junk yard and say that'd make the
swaying chink sound or something like that, and they, sure
enough they could go up to it and make it
it sound exactly like what they were just describing. So
it's like a really niche group of people who work
(25:08):
in this really niche art. It's like you said before,
it's an art form and it's it's just fascinating to
read about, let alone talk about. I'm fascinated right now
if you can't tell.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Well, and just the the ability to disassociate sound from
object is key and just like super impressive, like you mentioned,
like to be able to look at a thing and
not see the thing, but see the sound you know,
or hear the sound I guess in your head. For sure,
potentially it's it's super cool. I love it. Like when
(25:41):
I was a kid, I remember seeing videos of fully
artists at work with a split screen of what's going
on on screen, and I was just like wrapped.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah, so that's that's how they do this. So usually
they work in pairs because there's like in a given scene,
there's probably frequently more going on than one person could
possibly handle. I know Jack Foley pioneered using canes with
shoes attached to the bottom to make multiple people walking
at the same time. It's a lot easier just have
(26:11):
another person in there, so you have like a fully
partner that you work with. And then there's the fully mixer.
And apparently they don't really see what the folly artists
are doing because they're keeping an ear out to see
if it matches what they think it should on the screen.
They're making a lot of the final decisions on how
it gets like what sound gets made, how it gets
(26:33):
sweetened or tightened or like tweaked or whatever. Yeah, and
then if you step back and watch, like like you said,
they're there in front of this giant screen or even
a TV sometimes and they're just acting along with the actor,
but making the sounds with stuff that you know, you
just would never say, like, yes, this is obviously. This
(26:55):
salary is obviously what you would use to make the
sound when somebody falls down and breaks a bit.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Yeah, they SELLAR snap is pretty good.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Yeah, it definitely works. It's an industry wide vegetable.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
It is. They start with a spotting session, which is
essentially just sitting down with the director and all the
sound department and fully department and just making a huge list.
You go through the movie and you just have a
huge list of every single scene, every single sound you
need to make. It's not the same thing as ADR,
which is additional dialogue recording, which is a lot of
(27:30):
times actors will have to come in. We had to
do this we're own TV show a little bit, Yeah,
and you have to restate your lines for one reason
or another and try and match it up and we're
watching the screen. But they do use the same technique
called looping, which is just playing the thing on a
loop over and over and over to try and sink
it as close as you can.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah, and it's amazing that anybody can do that because
it's really hard.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah what ADR fully ADR well both yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, adr.
I felt kind of dumb when I had to do it,
because it was, you know, you're trying to even though
we were bad actors, like we were trying to conveyce.
You're always trying to convey some sort of emotion with
everything that you're saying, even if it's just normal or
bored that is. And just to do that in a
(28:15):
room looking at yourself like with no experience, it was.
It was tough for me.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I blamed Brian for all of those.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Oh no, so you'll hear this, by the way.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
So oh yeah, I know I'm hoping you will.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Yeah, yeah, I knew it.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
One of the other very classic things you'll see in
a Foley studio is the floor will basically have like
a raised section and it'll be divided into like squares,
and one square will have like a concrete pad, another
square will have pebbles, another square won't have you know,
parquet fleets. Yeah, leaves, although I saw that they don't
usually use leaves. They use like old magnetic reel to
(28:53):
reel tape. Yeah yeah, and pull it out and crinkle
it and that makes a better leaf sound than a leaf.
Somebody figured that out along the way that leaf sounds
don't really make a good leaf sound. Isn't that crazy?
That's how manipulated we are when we watch movies. Uh.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
True. But I have seen them go in the field
for like forest walks and stuff. So there's a mix
of everything. There's not like just one way to do things.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
And they all know share stuff like whoever came up
with the celery is probably regarded as a as a
you know, a genius in the field for sure.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Yeah, I'm sure they're They're.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
Using carrots before that, right.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
I also saw there was in that New Yorker profile
one of the Folly artists talks about a Halloween mask
of the tin Man that got handed down from her
former Folly partner when he retired, and she was like,
nothing will ever make this sound. It's like a shit
like it's described as a yawning chit sound. I can't
(29:50):
even wrap my mind around that.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
But what sound is it supposed to be.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
A yawning chill sound? I don't know. I think it used.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
It's like, what's it used for?
Speaker 2 (29:58):
I don't know. Okay, if you wait a little bit,
I can look her up and call and ask, oh.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
No, no, no, that's all right. I just wondered if
you were like, and that's the sound of a pot
going on a stove.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
How about this, Let's edit this in the sound of
a pot going on the stove.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Okay, perfect, But she was she.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Was pointing out like I think they even said, like
she ordered a new one online and it came and
she was like, this doesn't sound anything like it. It's
made of different materials, so like it's so nuanced. I
saw a quote from David Fincher, the director, who is
like a huge fan of foli art artists, and he
(30:36):
basically was like, where we're looking at like the like
a scene of some people having a meeting in a
lawyer's office, and he's like, what is the what does
the nauga hide or the leather on the sofa sound like?
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah, like is it is it fake? Like is this
a strip mall lawyer's office or is it like a
really well healed lawyer's office, so it's real leather Like
that kind of attention to detail, Yeah, fully artists make
like that's what makes a movie like engrossing or you know,
at the very least extremely realistic, like that level of
(31:12):
attention to detail.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah, or if you're not paying attention to detail like that,
it makes something stand out as and you may not
even recognize it, but subconsciously it may just a sound
may sit wrong if they don't do it right.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Yeah, like if somebody sits on a leather couch and
it makes a yawning sound, right, you're gonna be like,
what was that?
Speaker 1 (31:32):
That's a tidman helmet? Right.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
You wouldn't believe them if they told you that's right.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
So the you know, the Fuly stage is amazing. They
have that floor. It's just riddled with props and weird
things that they all. They don't call it by the thing,
you know, they call it by the sound it makes.
Like you don't say give me those coconuts, you say
give me the hoofs, although they don't use coconuts. It's
a little bit of a money python reference there. But yeah,
it's a fun looking room. Like I encourage everyone to go,
(31:59):
like see some like YouTube video of a Folly artist
and work in their little kind of cool air conditioned
dark room. There's water like that. There's usually like a bathtub,
there's usually a working toilet, uh, and just all manner
of props that people.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Use you wanted to take a break and come back
and talk a little more about sound effects.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Let's do it. Show me open my door.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
And then look out, Chuck grown out again.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
All right, So Dave kind of dug up some fun,
classic uh folly tricks from famous movies, and we're gonna
talk about those and more because we're going to get
into Star Wars as well, because everyone loves talking about
Star Wars.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Well, the guy who was the fully artist and I
guess sound designer for Star Wars, Ben Burt, just changed
the industry from what I could tell. He's a really
interesting creative guy.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Yeah, we talked about him before he was the Wilhelm
Scream guy.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Yes, yes, did you see the Wilhelm Scream thing I sent?
Speaker 1 (33:26):
I did not?
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Oh? Got I know the story of the Wilhelm Scream.
You want to hear it?
Speaker 1 (33:31):
We did a whole episode on it, didn't we.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
No, we just mentioned it and then Jerry put the
wrong one in.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Oh, I thought we did a whole short stuff on it.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
On the Wilhelm Scream. I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
I thought we did well. Either way, Just go ahead.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
All right, if we have then we'll edit this part out.
But Essentially, the Wilhelm Scream was a scream that they
they think was recorded by a guy named chev Woolley,
who was an actor and musician who's known for the
song people Eater. He's the guy who's saying that, And
it was in a movie called Distant Drums. And I
think we can play the Wilhelm scream right here, right.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
But I mean I thought we could the first time,
and it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Well, let's try again. So this is what we're talking about.
This is the very famous Wilhelm scream. Okay, so apparently
Shebb Woolley recorded that for Distant Drums, but it didn't
become kind of, I guess a thing or iconic or
well used two until two years later there was a
movie called The Charge at Feather River and a character
(34:34):
named Private Willhelm gets shot in the leg by an arrow,
an he screams the Wilhelm scream. Still wasn't called the
Wilhelm scream until Ben Burt came along for Star Wars
and he'd seen just tons of Westerns as a kid,
and that Wilhelm scream showed up in almost all of them.
So he sought out that scream and found it in
(34:56):
the charge at feather River Sound Library and used it.
The first time it shows up is when Luke shoots
a stormtrooper and the stormtrooper falls off of something or
other I can't remember where exactly, and he adopted as
a signature sound, and it just became kind of an
iconic in joke among sound editors since then.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah, you know, it may have been movie crush. That
makes sense where I covered that. Yeah, totally makes sense.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
And I think it was all that's interesting. So it's
been in over four hundred films.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Amazing. Yeah, the ET sound. They needed ET to sound
a certain way when Et walked around, because they needed
him to sound like an ET but also not be
like gross. They wanted people to like ET, so they
used like jello wrapped in a damp T shirt and
raw liver apparently just for this sort of squishy walking sounds.
(35:49):
That's pretty good one.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yikes, what about Titanic? This is a good one.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
No spoilers are going to spoil the end of Titanic.
Oh come on, so you can dial out now if
you want to. But at the end of Titanic, Kate
Winslet is floating on a door or a piece of
wood or something. I think it's a door and she's
freezing cold, and they used apparently frozen lettuce to recreate
her the sound of her hair movie.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah, which was perfect because I remember that sound effect.
I don't think I was like that crispy hair sounds
crazy at the time, but when I read about it,
I remember that it made some sort of impact on me. Yeah,
to prevent anybody from emailing in. Apparently it's not a door.
Everybody says it's a door, but some people on Reddit
found the piece of the staircase that it was taken from,
(36:39):
So James Cameron's film was so accurate that you could
determine that she was floating on a piece of staircase
that is shown earlier in The Titanic before it sinks.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
I think it was a door.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
That's fine. I just wanted I knew somebody who's going
to email in, and I wanted to burst their bubble
fight club.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
You know, if you've ever heard of fistfight in real life,
A I'm sorry, because that's a really dumb thing to do,
is to punch somebody. But a punch to somebody's face
in real life, to their body doesn't sound anything like
it sounds in the movies. It's a fairly boring sound,
so they need to recreate that obviously, And a lot
(37:17):
of times they're punching you know, raw meat and things
like that and adding extra like bass and kind of
tweak it and posts. But apparently in Fight Club, chicken
carcasses were pounded with baseball bats along with the sounds
of cracking walnuts. Yes, pretty good.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
There's this movie called Berbery in sound studio back in
twenty twelve. Did you see it?
Speaker 1 (37:39):
I've never heard of it.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
It was a little art house movie the what's the
British actor the short British actor with classes Toby somebody?
He played Capoti Jiman Capodi?
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Oh yeah, Toby Jones.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Maybe, yes, you're right. So Toby Jones is in it
and he's a folly artist who starts to descend into
madness and essentially the entire movie takes place on a
fully studiente and there's parts where they're stabbing a melon
to make the sound of the person on screen getting stabbed.
And the folly artists who actually worked on that movie
(38:12):
said that they had to use wet cloth and wood
to make the sound of the folly artist on the
screen stabbing the water melon to make the sound of
the person on their screen getting stabbed with a knife.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
I think I do remember that movie. I don't think
I saw it, but I remember that happening.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
It's worth seeing. It's a slow burn that, possibly, depending
on your view, never actually ignites. Okay, but it's an
interesting movie. He does a good job.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
They should put that on the poster. Possibly never ignites Josh.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Clark right, like, this is the best we could get.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Melons are useful, use a lot of melons for a
lot of things. A hand inside of melon apparently was
on that first dinosaur egg hatches sorry spoiler alert in
Jurassic Park. It was a hand inside of the melon
combined with the cracking of an ice cream cone.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Very nice. I saw Raiders of the Lost Art that
famous bowlder rolling at Indy in the beginning of the
movie first movie. Yeah, it was a car with no
motor being rolled down a hill.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Oh, okay, and that was also Ben Burt Oh was it?
Speaker 2 (39:20):
That makes sense?
Speaker 1 (39:21):
Yeah? He did all the Internet Jones movies. He did
et He was clearly a Spielberg Lucas guy.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yeah he was. He was good and probably still is
he still working?
Speaker 1 (39:32):
I bet he is. He's in his midish seventies, so
I bet he's still out there.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Okay, there we go.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
I like to think he is. Should we talk about
some of those Star Wars sounds too while we're here?
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
The blaster Star Wars blaster, very very legendary film sci
fi sound. He and you'll see a lot of sound
people that just like kind of always carry around their
recording device. I don't know if they do that kind
of stuff on phones now, just to say like hey,
this like just to pick up the sound. But back Ben,
for Ben Bird, it was a Nagra reel to real recorder,
(40:03):
and he was on he was just collecting sounds all
over the place to potentially use for Star Wars. And
that's kind of the fun thing, is just looking around
the world and like just collecting noises and say, you know,
this might come in handy later. You never know, right,
And they were in the Pocono's and he went to
he saw a radio tower with those big, taut, big
(40:24):
bundled wire support cables and he was like, I wonder
what that sounds like when I hit it. He hit
it with a rock and it made that sound, and
then he did it at another tower, a radio tower
in the Mahave Desert, and combine those tweaked him a
little bit, and that's how you get that laser blast,
which you two can make. If you ever see one
of those really really taught cables, have you hit that
(40:44):
thing with something metal, it'll go cute.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Yeah, there's a bunch of different laser blasts in Star Wars,
but the ones that were made with that sound effector
once you know that, you can you can really clearly
hear it. It's perfect.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah, I think it's the blaster sound.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Well, you mean Han Solo's blaster.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, I mean the blaster is just a type of gun.
I mean, we're probably gonna get in big trouble from
Star Wars people. But when they put laser sound, I
was like, oh, you can't say that, dude, it's a blaster.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Let's move on to the tie fighters.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
How about that, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
Those are actually so the very famous.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Whaw hey, that's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Thanks. Those are African elephants that are roaring, layered over
one another and then distorted so that it doesn't sound
like elephants. But when you hear that and you go
listen to the tie fighters sound being made, You'll say, yeah,
that's an elephant.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
I think you do a Chewbacca too, don't you know?
I thought you used to do that.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Now my Chewbacca sounds like this wall, wall wall, It's
like a nitross.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
I could have sworn it was you that did a
pretty good Chewbacca, but maybe not. But apparently Chewbacca was
made by just combining a bunch of different animals and
again layering them on top of one another, a walrus,
a badger, and a bear at the very least. And
then we got to mention R two D two because
that's where ben Bert brings in. And you know, a
(42:10):
big change in the industry is when the synthesizer, especially
the mogue was invented, because not only could you make
all sorts of like cool space ag music for soundtracks,
you could also make just bleeps and bloops, which is
what he did. He had a Coorg synthesizer, a very
early Chorg, and did these you know, beeps and boops
for R two D two. And you know, you think,
(42:31):
all right, that's great, big deal. But the genius of
it is that he somehow creates emotion and conveys emotion
through these beeps and boops from a little droid with
a synthesizer. Yeah, that's it's magic.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
That's the reason fully artists are still around because you
can't you just can't do that with stock stuff from
a sound library.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah, or you could tell when it's done that way
for sure.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
There you go. So one other thing we should probably
touch on real quicker nature documentaries.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Yeah, to get ready to be disappointed.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah, they get a lot of guf for basically fudging stuff,
and they are legendary for fudging stuff like apparently they'll
use semi domesticated animals that they rent to film, you know,
chasing a lamb around or something like that. But one
of the things they're very frequently criticized on is using
sound effects and really kind of going overboard with them.
(43:28):
But by the nature of what they're making, they have
to use sound effects to begin with.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Yeah, I mean a lot of this stuff is filmed
on very long lenses from very far away. If you're
filming a lion tracking down an antelope and killing it,
you're not like right up on it, you know, so
you don't have the sound to begin with. Maybe they
bring some people out there with those long distance mics
to record some stuff, but then there's just so much
ambient sound they probably can't use it. So generally, if
(43:59):
you see like you know, a Planet Earth discovery documentary,
these the sound department is handed kind of like a
silent film almost, and they use you know, it's not
like they gotta have to use like real animal calls
for the real animals. They're not just like, hey, let's
make this lion sound kind of like different. So they
(44:19):
want accuracy there for sure. But you know when you
see a mushroom growing in a time lapse, they're just
adding all those sounds of like a mushroom stretching its
arms out. Yees, mushroom doesn't have arms its head.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
Sure, I mean, lean in and put your ear to
a mushroom as it's growing, and you're not going to
hear anything. It doesn't make a sound.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Nope.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Another one they get accused of is making the northern
lights make a sound. Yeah, those don't make a sound.
There's just all sorts of like if you stop and
think about it, like a close up of a spider
walking on a leaf, it wouldn't make a sound, but
it would look weird to not have a sound, or
at the very least it looks better. That makes the
whole thing better too. Sound, I don't really I mean,
(45:01):
nature documentaries are so fudged to begin with that I
don't really have a problem with that.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
The sound, Yeah, I don't have a problem. And I
think if someone like you said, if you sat someone
down and showed them just the realistic thing with just
the realistic sound, it's probably not nearly as compelling.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
They'd be like, can I leave now you anything else?
Speaker 1 (45:24):
Yeah, one last thing, just sort of on the note
of using things like pro tools. I mentioned earlier that
it was was kind of budget related, and obviously big
movies can just afford to do whatever they want in
terms of that kind of thing. But even then, the
sound line items are often just a very small part
of the budget. You know, it kind of depends, but
you know, when you budget out a movie or a
(45:45):
TV show or commercial or anything, you kind of have
a general template to work for, like we're going to
allocate this percentage for this, this percentage for this camera
department's going to get probably something like this, and sound
is always like maybe ten percent or so, and a
lot of times. That can include the rights to play
soundtrack stuff. And you know, it depends on the movie.
If it's like Dazed and Confused or something like that,
(46:07):
there's really music reliant. You know, you're gonna have to
spend a lot of money on that, So you may
you may look at the post production sound and be like,
I'm sorry, you have very little to work with. So
that's where you're gonna get stuff like pulled from libraries
a little more. When you get these big, big movies,
that's when they can afford to bring into folly artists
and the whole teams. And that's why this sound is
(46:27):
always really awesome and that's why they highlight it at
the Academy Awards.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
Yes. Nice. Yeah, So go forth and watch movies and
listen out for sounds and you'll probably be amazed here
or there.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Yeah, but don't get so caught up in that. Like
I wonder if fully artists can even watch movies I
know and enjoy them.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
I feel so bad for people who can't watch movies,
who can't enjoy food because they're chefs or something like that.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Yeah, yeah, totally can't.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Enjoy simple pleasures in life because they know too much
about it, you know, can't enjoy maloney or sausage.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yeah, I say here's a new stuff you should know
T shirt. We have a new T shirt seller.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Right, Yeah, it's on Cotton Bureau, our new merch merchant.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Yeah. We've never put a lot of effort into merch,
but we always hear people asking, So Cotton Bureau stuff
you should know. You can find our merch now. And
I think a new T shirt should be stay dumb,
Enjoy Things.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Oh that's a good one. Yeah, that's a great one.
All right, Well let's have Aaron Cooper get on it,
because I say, I think two thirds of our shirts
in our merch store from Aaron Cooper because he's really
good at it.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
Yeah, and State of enjoy Things is perfect to promote
a show that's all about trying to make people smarter precisely.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
Yeah, I wonder if we can get his shirt that says.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
How would you spell that?
Speaker 2 (47:43):
I don't know. I'm going to leave that to Aaron Cooper.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Well, since we said Aaron Cooper's name at least two times,
I think maybe three, we've unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
You don't want to say it three times because he'll
be right behind you. All right, here we go from Stephanie,
and I feel bad about this because I even knew this. Hey, guys,
thanks for the great episode about the militarization of the police.
I'm truly grateful for the decade of learning since I've
been listening. One of you commented, I think it was me,
probably that you were surprised to read about the police
(48:16):
in teen Vogue. I thought you might be interested to
know that teen Bogue is pretty well known for serious
journalism and being an example for taking young women and
girls seriously. I knew that, and we've even talked about
this before, and so I don't know why it's like, oh,
than Vogue.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
No, it was me, was it? It was one hundred
percent of me.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
Oh I thought it was me. Well, I'll throw myself
on that grenade. That's along with you. That's all right,
But she says, here's an article from Jezebel by Julian
Escabato Shepherd. If you're shocked teen Bogue is great, you're
not paying attention. I imagine you may get other emails like this,
although I may be the first, since I was up
(48:53):
crazy early and listened right away. Thanks and have a
great day, and that is from Stephanie.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Thanks Stephanie. Those are the correct that we love to
get where it's very gentle, but also like you guys,
come on, you know yeah, if you can balance those
two things, you've come up with a great correction email
as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
If you want to be like Stephanie and send us
a correction or just an email say hi or whatever,
you can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.