Tdhtdhtdhtdhtdh: Sound Effects!

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

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.

Hey, that was a sound effect in and of itself.

I guess, I don't know if it really qualifies, but I appreciate the support, Chuck.

It was Josh introing the show as he falls off of a cliff.

No, it was Josh in space.

Yeah, that too.

Yeah, the cliff works too.

I like you in space better than dying.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

But I think that really goes to illustrate just how versatile sound effects can be.

Yeah, I'm excited about this one.

I am too.

This was a Dave joint.

He helps us with this.

I knew nothing about this stuff.

I mean, I knew that the people who make this are often called Foley 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 about this one too.

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 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 or you hear that car drive down the road or anything you hear, a door shut, footsteps.

All of that stuff is created in post-production, either by a person doing it, a Foley 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,

like car door shut, stuff like that.

Or sometimes, you know, that stuff now obviously is created through the wizardry of computering.

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 Foley artists do is so intricate and so well done that computers just can't replicate it yet.

Like, yeah,

there's a car door sound, sounds good, but it just doesn't quite work.

And the reason why, from what I saw, all the explanations I saw basically said Foley artists are

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 them if they weren't there or they were 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 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 and the lighting and there's a boom person that's that's like oh don't worry about me like I also have to stand in this room yeah brian and 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 back to what I said before about how every sound you hear basically that is not dialogue or or music like soundtrack stuff or unless it's diegetic

sound actually screws things up on recording out in the world.

Like that's why 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 hold for sound because there's a lawnmower and they may add a lawnmower later to make something more real, but they don't want the lawnmower 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 that's why they shoot like restaurant scenes like completely silent.

Everybody is miming,

talking in the background.

And it's really weird when you see like a clip of it.

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.

Yeah.

And it's also hard.

I did an extra thing or two.

That's hard to do.

Yeah, for sure.

I'm sure those are two sides of the same coin.

Yeah.

So two, those were two great quick points.

Seven quick points from me.

That's about how it goes.

So you said said a word back there a minute ago, diegetic.

And that stood out to me like, what?

And the reason why I didn't stop you and say, what 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 lawnmower, that car driving by, the machine gun,

you know,

From the car driving by.

That's my best one.

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.

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.

Yeah, unless it's like a naked gun kind of thing.

And then they might like the strings will swell and somebody will be like, did you hear that?

Has Ruby taken you to the new naked gun?

I took myself, Scotty and I went.

Oh, really?

How was it?

It's very, very, very funny.

Really?

So do you know Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson are a couple now?

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, I kind of hoped they would get together.

Well, they did, buddy.

your wish came true she's very funny in it it's 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 so

so um You talked about how you hold for Lawnmower and all that, and that that stuff's added on later.

I think something like 90% 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 in post-production.

That's how important this stuff is.

And like you said, though, it just, it gets treated like a 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.

Yeah, for sure.

And again, we're going to get into the Foley 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 recordings of that stuff.

They don't want the universal catalog of

car doors shutting.

They want to get their own.

Maybe it's a specific car.

In fact, that's what they should be doing because car doors are very specific, the sound they make.

So they'll go out in the field.

There was a whole movie about that, Blowup, or 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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was actually a pretty good movie.

Great.

This is a classic, right?

Don't people consider it a classic?

There's also, so in addition to car doors 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 on onto the sound library file called sweetening.

And 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.

Yeah, they get really into it.

It's a good nerdy sort of line of work.

You got to have a good ear, that's for sure.

Cause 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 that's like real sound effects.

Um, a lot of the things that are created via computer are, but not all of them, are things that don't exist.

You know, like if you're gonna do like a movie set in outer space, you're gonna be making up a lot of brand new sounds that have never been made before.

Yeah, they seem to love that stuff because they have like carte blanc to just go nuts and get creative, basically.

It's awesome.

Um, another one that gets left out that sounds really boring, but apparently it's really hard are footsteps.

Um, 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, they're essentially there because somebody put them there.

People don't use them.

You have to make the footsteps based on the actor and how they're moving and not just in sync with them, but a good Foley artist will

take into account the weight, the height, the gait.

Are they shuffling?

Are they high-stepping?

Are they goose-stepping?

They take all this stuff into account to make a specific kind of walk or footfall for a particular actor.

Yeah, and a lot of times this stuff is dictated by budget.

Obviously, Foley 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.

Probably.

They're trying their best.

They're doing their best.

They don't have the kind of dough for that.

So, you know, it all just depends.

So I say, do you want to go back to the beginning of all this?

Yeah, which is surprisingly silent movies, right?

Yeah, well, apparently it goes even further back than that to vaudeville, before there were even movies.

People would play along on stage to make sound effects with vaudeville acts.

So it was a pretty

brainless transition

from vaudeville stages to the stage underneath a movie.

And it was just somebody playing along.

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.

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 the 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 to just simulate things like the 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.

Right.

I never knew a dog actually sounded like that yeah um there's 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 um and there's a video of his called vintage sound effect 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, 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.

And he is really blown up.

He's like got

close to 5 million Instagram people now.

Wow.

and

has had like some famouses on there that take part.

And the delight of Josh Harmon's 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 sesh with Josh Harmon.

Nice.

Oh, man.

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

a bunch of stuff you should know.

People are like, yeah, get Chuck, get Chuck.

But he, you know, it didn't get through.

Oh, well, keep trying, Chuck.

I'm going to.

Maybe this will get to him.

It could.

Attention, Josh Harmon.

Do this.

What about slapstick, though?

I didn't know that even.

Yeah, the term is actually, you know, slapstick is like physical, silly comedy made up with Pratt Falls.

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.

It's like two wooden duck bills that you smack together

as a clacker.

Yeah.

And they use that when somebody had a prat fall, like when they tumbled and fell or something like that, they would use this slapstick.

And that's 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.

I love it.

Maybe, yeah, here, let's finish up with the Jazz Singer and then take a break.

What do you say?

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 it on silent movies or was it just the birth of the movies or something like that?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

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 they're playing it.

And it was basically like a record.

They recorded it on shellac discs, like an LP.

And once the Jazz Singer came out, a whole new industry was born from silent movies.

Right.

Like throwing a light switch.

Like silent movies were out and talkies were in.

Like this was an enormous innovation for sure.

So yeah, I say that's a great setup for where we are in history with sound effects.

All right.

So we're just going to walk away.

Clip, clop, clip, clop.

Wait, wait.

Oh, no.

We'll be right back.

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You do a great

machine gun, and I have to say, you and Scott Auckerman both do great machine gun sounds with your mouth.

That is from

years and years of playing with fake M16s in the woods.

What is that horrible instinct that little boys have?

I don't know.

It's weird.

I'm glad it usually

gets left behind or shed as you get older, typically.

Let's pick up that stick and go.

yeah.

See, that was terrible.

No, that was pretty good.

That was a, that was a modified M16.

All right, how about this?

Bullet, bullet, bullet.

Is that good?

Did I ever tell you about the time I was playing Laser Tag?

And we didn't, it was like at like 10.30 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.

Yeah.

So the guy who worked there, this 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

chest piece would reset.

He kept just shooting me and killing me.

And finally I shouted at him like, stop.

And he just laughed and walked away.

But he killed me probably like 10 times in just, you know, however long it took to reset.

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 going to be running around and screaming and shooting.

I was like, everyone, find a position and stay there, comfortably higher ground.

And I feel kind of bad because we dominated and I specifically dominated.

I beat her.

It was like, I had like 10 times the points as the next highest person.

That's awesome.

Against kids, though?

Yeah.

So I just, I got in a high spot and was just picking them off as they came up.

You're like Billy Madison playing dodgeball in Billy Madison.

Oh, and not only did I not feel bad, I got a lot of satisfaction out of it.

I'll bet, ma'am.

Yeah, it was fun.

I'll bet.

Instead of bullet, did you go laser, laser, laser?

I did.

Well, that's our laser tag anecdotes, everybody.

All right.

We got to talk about a legend named Jack Foley, and this guy's story is pretty great.

He was there at the beginning, like where we left off with the release of

the jazz singer in 1927.

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.

He did that for decades.

He was 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.

And 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 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 Foley.

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.

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, oh my gosh, this is the new thing.

We have to have our talkie.

And And Universal had already gotten the movie Showboat in the can as a silent film.

And they said, we want to change this into a talkie.

So Jack Foley goes over to stage 10 at Universal Studios with an orchestra and started working his magic, which was, you know, fairly limited stuff at first, like audiences cheering and water and the sounds of the steamboat and stuff like that.

You know, he's kind of saved the day.

Yeah, and the thing is, so there's this live orchestra playing along with 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 is playing, and he's making these sound effects as it's 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 10 minutes.

I think it probably varies a little bit, but somewhere around there, let's say 10 minutes of film,

several scenes, he could do the sound effects live in one take.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

He, you know, 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, like 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 a credit for this because there was no such thing as a foley artist until after him.

No, his first movie, like you said, was Steamboat, which I think came out in 1928.

And his last movie was Spartacus in 1960.

He did scores, probably hundreds and hundreds of movies and yeah, never once got an on-screen credit, which is nuts.

Yeah.

I mean, the credit is named after him.

Like, he invented a credit.

Yeah, for sure.

By the way, I think it was the early 60s and Desilu was the first studio outside of Universal

to call their Foley Room a Foley room.

Amazing.

What year was that?

Like 61 or something like that.

So kind of right after he was done, he got the honor.

Yeah, I guess that was amazing.

Yeah.

That Desi Arnaz, man, he really, he was a class act.

I did a shoot on the Lucy stage one time.

It was pretty cool.

Oh, yeah.

Is she buried there?

No, no, no.

It was just where they shot it.

Oh, okay.

Like, I would always ask anytime you're shooting at one of the old, like Paramount Lot or Universal, 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 neat.

Right.

Hans Moleman goes, I'm only 31 years old.

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 Foley 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 of.

Yeah, which is really saying something.

Yeah.

But it went from potentially flying back to Spain and rehiring thousands of extras and reshooting these two days just for the sound to, no, 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 way to go out, I think.

Oh, absolutely.

Great movie.

There are about 100 folio 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, they're obviously, you know, I mentioned earlier, they have great ears.

Apparently, Dave found that some of them have to wear earplugs in movies and

concerts and things like that because their ears are just so kind of tuned in and sensitive.

Right.

And they have their own language.

You know, they don't say,

well, 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 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?

Oh, they definitely do.

There's this really great profile in the New Yorker where I think that hundred working um foliar artists came from.

One that one of the foliar artists profiled said there was probably a hundred, but they, I mean, just the different words that they use for these sounds are like they

immediately know what the other one is talking about, and just even more than that, they can point to

some chain or block and tackle just hanging in a junkyard and say that'd make the swaying chink sound or something like that.

And

sure enough, they could go up to it and make it sound exactly like what they were just describing.

So it's like a really niche group of people who work in this really niche art.

It's like you said before, it's an art form.

And it's just fascinating to read about, let alone talk about.

I'm fascinated right now, if you can't tell.

Well, and just

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 super cool.

I love it.

Like when I was a kid, I remember seeing videos of Foley artists at work with a split screen of what's going on on screen.

And I was just like wrapped.

Yeah.

So 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 to just have another person in there.

So you have like a Foley partner that you work with.

And then there's the Foley mixer.

And apparently they don't really see what the Foley 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 sweetened or tightened or like tweaked or whatever.

Yeah.

And then if you step back and watch, like you said,

they're 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 celery is obviously what you would use to make the sound when somebody falls down and breaks a bone.

Yeah.

But they use celery.

Colour snap is pretty good.

Yeah, it definitely works.

It's an industry-wide vegetable.

It is.

They start with a spotting session, which is essentially just sitting down with the director and all the sound department and Foley 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 times actors will have to come in.

We had to do this for our 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, you know, sync it as close as you can.

Yeah.

And it's amazing that anybody can do that because it's really hard.

Yeah.

What, ADR or Foley?

ADR.

Well, both.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ADR always, 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 convey, 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

just to do that in a room looking at yourself like with no experience.

It was, it was tough for me.

I blamed Brian for all of those.

oh no

so

um you'll hear this by the way so oh yeah i know i'm hoping he will yeah yeah i knew it one of the other very classic things you'll see in a foli 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 will have you know parquet floors yeah leaves although i saw that they don't usually use leaves they use um like old magnetic reel-to-reel tape.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they 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.

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.

Right, true.

And they all, you 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 for sure yeah i'm sure they're they were using carrots before that right

i also saw um there was in that new yorker profile one of the foley artists talks about a halloween mask of the tin man that got handed down from her former foley 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 shit sound i can't even wrap my mind around that but what sound is it supposed to be?

A yawning ch sound.

I don't know.

I think it used it's.

Like what's it used for?

I don't know.

Okay.

If you wait a little bit, I can look her up and call and ask.

Oh, 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.

How about this?

Let's edit this in.

The sound of a pot going on the stove.

Okay, perfect.

But she was pointing out, like, I think they even said, like, she ordered a new one

online, and it came and she was 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 Foley artists.

And he basically was like,

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?

Yeah, yeah.

Like, is it, is it fake?

Like, is this a strip mall lawyer's office?

Or is it like a really well-heeled lawyer's office?

So it's real leather?

Like that kind of attention to detail that holy artists make,

like, that's what makes a movie like engrossing or, you know, at the very least, extremely realistic, like that level of attention to detail.

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 yeah like if somebody sits on a leather couch and it makes a yawning shh sound right you're gonna be like what was that that's a tinband helmet right you wouldn't believe them if they told you that's right uh so the you know the foley stage is amazing they have that flora 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 know you say uh give me the hooves although they don't use coconuts it's a little little bit of a money python reference there.

But yeah, it's a fun-looking room.

Like, I encourage everyone to go, like, see some YouTube video of a Foley artist in work in their little kind of cool, air-conditioned dark room.

There's water, like, there's usually a bathtub, there's usually a working toilet,

and just all manner of props that people use.

That's right.

You want to take a break and come back and talk a little more about sound effects?

Let's do it.

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Let me open my door.

Over the house, Dave.

And then look out, Chuck.

Going out again.

All right.

So Dave kind of dug up some fun, classic Foley tricks from famous movies.

And we're going to talk about those and more because we're going to get into Star Wars as well because everyone loves talking about Star Wars.

Well, the guy who was the Foley 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.

Yeah.

We've talked about him before.

He was the Wilhelm Scream guy.

Yes.

Yes.

Did you see the Wilhelm Scream thing I sent?

I did not.

Oh,

I know the story of the Wilhelm Scream.

You want to hear it?

We did a whole episode on it, didn't we?

No, we just mentioned it and then Jerry put the wrong one in.

Oh, I thought we did a whole short stuff on it.

On the Wilhelm Scream?

I don't think so.

I thought we did.

Either way, just go ahead.

All right.

If we have, then we'll edit this part out.

But essentially, the Wilhelm scream was a scream that

they think was recorded by a guy named Sheb Woolley, who is an actor and musician who's known for the song Purple People Eater.

He's the guy who sang that.

And it was in a movie called Distant Drums.

And I think we can play

the Wilhelm scream right here, right?

I mean, I thought we could the first time and it didn't work.

Well, let's try again.

So, this is what we're talking about.

This is the very famous Wilhelm scream.

Okay, so apparently, Sheb Woolley recorded that for distant drums, but it didn't become kind of,

I guess, a thing or iconic or well-used

until two years later.

There was a movie called The Charge at Feather River, and a character named Private Wilhelm gets shot in the leg by an arrow and 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 the Wilhelm Scream showed up in almost all of them.

So he sought out that scream and found it in 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 it as a signature sound, and it just became kind of an iconic in-joke among sound editors since then.

Yeah.

You know, it may have been Movie Crush.

That makes sense.

Where I covered that.

Yeah, totally makes sense.

And I think it was all that's interesting said it's been in over 400 films.

Amazing.

Yeah.

The E.T.

sound, they needed E.T.

to sound a certain way when E.T.

walked around because they needed him to sound like an E.T., but also not be like gross.

They wanted people to like E.T., so they

like jello wrapped in a damp t-shirt and raw liver, apparently just for the sort of squishy walking sounds.

That's a pretty good one.

Yikes.

What about Titanic?

This is a good one.

No spoilers.

I'm 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

the sound of her hair hair moving 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 remembered that it made some sort of impact on me yeah um 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.

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.

I think it was a door.

That's fine.

I just wanted, I knew somebody was going to email in and I wanted to burst their bubble.

Fight Club, you know, if you've ever heard of fist fight 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 or 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 of times they're punching, you know, raw meat and things like that and adding extra like bass and kind of tweaking it and post.

But apparently in Fight Club,

chicken carcasses were pounded with baseball bats along with the sounds of cracking walnuts.

Yes.

Pretty good.

There was this movie called Burberry in Sound Studio.

back in 2012.

Did you see it?

I've never heard of it.

It was a little art house movie.

What's the British actor, the short British actor with classes, Toby somebody?

He played Capote, Jim Capote.

Oh, yeah, Toby Jones, maybe?

Yes, you're right.

So Toby Jones is in it, and he's a Foley artist who starts to descend into madness.

And essentially, the entire movie takes place on a Foley studio stage.

And there's parts where they're stabbing a melon to make the sound of the person on screen getting stabbed.

And the Foley artist who actually worked on that movie said that they had to use

wet cloth and wood to make the sound of the foliarist on the screen stabbing the watermelon to make the sound of the person on their screen getting stabbed with a knife.

I think I do remember that movie.

I don't think I saw it, but I remember that happening.

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.

They should put that on the poster.

Possibly Never Ignites, Josh Clark.

Right.

They're like, this is the best we could get.

Melons are useful.

I use a lot of melons for a lot of things.

A hand inside a melon apparently was when that first dinosaur egg hatches.

Sorry, spoiler alert.

In Jurassic Park, it was a hand inside of a melon combined with the cracking of an ice cream cone.

Very nice.

I also saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, that famous boulder rolling at Indy in the beginning of the movie.

First movie.

Yeah.

It was a car with no motor being rolled down a hill.

Oh, okay.

And that was also Ben Burt.

Oh, was it?

That makes sense.

Yeah, he did all the Indiana Jones movies.

He did E.T.

He was clearly a Spielberg-Lucas-y guy.

Yeah.

He was good.

And probably still is.

Is he still working?

I bet he is.

He's in his middish 70s, so I bet he's still out there.

Okay.

There we go.

I like to think he is.

Should we talk about some of those Star Wars sounds, too, while we're here?

Yeah, I think so.

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 then, for Ben Bird, it was a NAGRA reel-to-reel recorder.

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 Poconos and he went to a, he saw a radio tower with those big, taut, big

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 Mojave Desert and combined those.

tweaked them 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 taut cables.

If you hit that thing with something metal, it'll go Q.

Yeah, there's a bunch of different laser blasts in Star Wars, but the ones that were made with that sound effect, once you know that, you can really clearly hear it.

It's perfect.

Yeah, I think it's the blaster sound.

Well, you mean Han Solo's blaster?

Yeah, I mean, the blaster is just a type of gun.

I mean, we're probably going to get in big trouble from Star Wars people.

Probably.

But when Dave put laser sound, I was like, oh, no, you can't say that, dude.

It's a blaster.

Let's move on to the TIE fighters.

How about that?

Let's do it.

Those are actually so the very famous.

Hey, that's pretty good.

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 fighter sound being made,

you'll say, yeah, that's an elephant, I think.

You do a chewbaker, too, don't you?

No.

I thought you used to do that now.

My chewbacca sounds like this.

It's like a nitrous.

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, including a walrus, a badger, and a bear at the very least.

And then...

We got to mention R2-D2 because that's where Ben Burt brings in

a big change in the industry is when the synthesizer, especially the Moog, 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 Korg synthesizer, a very early Korg, and did these, you know, beeps and boops for R2D2.

And, you know, you think, 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.

That's the reason Foley artists are still around because you can't, you just can't do that with stock stuff from a sound library.

Yeah, or you could tell when it's done that way.

For sure.

There you go.

So, um, one other thing that we should probably touch on real quick are nature documentaries.

Yeah.

Get ready to be disappointed.

Yeah.

They get a lot of guff 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.

But by the nature of what they're making, they have to use sound effects to begin with.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the 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 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, they got to have to use like real animal animal calls for the real animals.

They're not just like, hey, let's make this lion sound kind of like different.

So they 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.

I guess mushroom doesn't have arms, its head.

Sure.

I mean, lean in and put your ear to a mushroom as it's growing and you're not going to hear anything.

Doesn't make a sound.

Nope.

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, it makes the whole thing better to add a sound.

I don't really, I mean, nature documentaries are so fudged to begin with that I don't really have a problem with that.

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.

They'd be like, can I leave now?

You got anything else?

Yeah, one last thing, just sort of on the note of using things like Pro Tools.

I mentioned earlier that it was kind of budget related.

And obviously, big movies can just afford to do whatever they want in terms of that kind of thing.

Even then, the sound line items are often just a very small part of the budget.

It kind of depends.

but when you budget out a movie or a 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 10% 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, that's really music reliant,

you know, you're going to have to spend a lot of money on that.

So

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 going to get stuff like pulled from libraries a little more.

When you get these big, big movies, that's when they can afford to bring in the Foley artists and the whole teams.

And that's why the sound is always really awesome.

And that's why they highlight it at the Academy Awards.

Yes.

Nice.

Yeah.

So go forth and watch movies and listen out for sounds and you'll probably be amazed here or there.

Yeah, but don't get so caught up in that.

Like, I wonder if Foley artists can even watch movies and enjoy them.

I feel so bad for people who can't watch movies, who can't enjoy food because they're chefs or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Who totally?

Can't enjoy simple pleasures in life because they know too much about it, you know?

Can't enjoy baloney or sausage.

Yeah, I say, here's a new stuff you should know t-shirt.

We have a new t-shirt seller, right?

Yeah, it's on Cotton Bureau, our new merch merchant.

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.

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.

Yeah, and Stay Dumb, Enjoy Things is perfect to promote a show that's all about trying to make people smarter.

Precisely.

Yeah.

I wonder if we can get a shirt that says...

How would you spell that?

I don't know.

I'm going to leave that to Aaron Cooper.

Yeah.

Well, since we said Aaron Cooper's name, at least two times, I think maybe three, we've unlocked listener mail.

You don't want to say it three times because he'll be right behind you.

All right, here we go.

This is 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 and Teen Vogue.

I thought you might be interested to know that Teen Vogue is pretty well known for serious journalism and being an example for taking young women and girls seriously.

I knew that, and we have even talked about this before, and so I don't know why.

I was like, oh, Teen Vogue.

No, it was me.

Was it?

Yeah, it was 100% me.

Oh, I thought it was me.

Well, I'll throw myself on that grenade.

That's okay.

Along with you.

That's all right.

But she says, here's an article from Jezebel by Julianne

Escobedo 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 crazy early and listened right away.

Thanks and have a great day.

And that is from Stephanie.

Thanks, Stephanie.

Those are the corrections that we love to get where it's very gentle, but also like you, you guys, come on.

You know?

If you can balance those two things, you've come up with a great correction email as far as I'm concerned.

Agreed.

If you want to be like Stephanie and send us a correction or just an email to say hi or whatever, you can send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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