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Old School Kung-Fu movie foley.


Tom HaisteadStockwell

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Hello everyone,

I was wondering if you guys wouldn't mind giving me a hand with something...

I am studying an Audio Post Production module at university and I have a piece of work coming soon where I have to take five minutes of a film and re-do it all (Score, sound effects and dialogue). I have decided to do a scene from an old martial arts film.

Here lies my problem though. To make it authentic I want to produce the sound effects the way they did. However, finding anything on this has proven extremely difficult.

The sound effects I am trying to discover more about are:

  • A powerful punch on bare skin
  • A quick snap punch or kick
  • Bone brake.

Along the lines of

or even

Is there anyone out there that has any research or has any knowledge as to how these sounds were made back in the day? It would be a great help.

Cheers,

Tom

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Black Dynamite was a hilarious movie, but really only if you remember the blaxsploitation films of the 1970s -- Shaft, Shaft's Big Score, Superfly, Cleopatra Jones, and so on.

The scene where the boom mike comes down and hits the actor in the head had me on the floor...

As to body hits, I think Vanessa Ament's book The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation goes into this in detail. Also good is David Yewdall's Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound. In truth, I think there are so many great body hits available as library effects, I think I'd reach for that just as a measure of practicality. But there's no law that says you can't feather in four or five simultaneous sounds, which is the trick that many of these "over-the-top" fight scenes use.

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I think the Yewdall book advised punching a watermelon (or some other soft fruit-like surface) with a bare fist, then layering in a low-frequency "whomp," and a broken stick or celery at the very end of the effect.

You look at stuff like the Bond punches and body falls from the 1960s -- they were dramatic, full of impact, and hilarious... but they sold the "bigger than life" aspect of the fight scene.

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I've worked at places with massive sound libraries, and I know there are commercial libraries that have all this classic Kung-Fu sounds in them, I just can't remember the names of them. I had fun just scrolling through the list listening to the stuff.

And yeah, the scene in Black Dynamite when his head hits the boom was a riot. I had to pause the movie I was laughing so hard.

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Found a good list of "do it yourself sound effects" techniques at this link:

http://www.epicsound.com/sfx/

Some very good tips there on how to record these from scratch. And as always, I'm always surprised when a very different sound winds up getting used for something else on-screen -- like dragging a bag of kitty litter on the ground, and it sounds like a flare igniting! I think there was a conversation on the Gearslutz Forum about tapping a half-dozen toothpicks on a piece of paper and using that as the sound of insects crawling across a floor.

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Amazing how good these tips can work. I'm reminded of the great radio shows of the 1930s and 1940s, like The Shadow and X-Minus One, which were classics, especially in their use of sound effects to create mood and suspense.

I worked on an insect horror film many years ago in post, William Castle's Bug, which was one of the creepiest damned things you'll ever see. Lotta grinchy moments and scary sound effects.

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Don't forget "Dimension X" and "Escape" Marc!

You could shout out to the Missouri radio theater dudes, I forget their name but it's in West Plains, MO. They do lots of cool old-school foley for radio theater.

Dan Izen

Amazing how good these tips can work. I'm reminded of the great radio shows of the 1930s and 1940s, like The Shadow and X-Minus One, which were classics, especially in their use of sound effects to create mood and suspense.

I worked on an insect horror film many years ago in post, William Castle's Bug, which was one of the creepiest damned things you'll ever see. Lotta grinchy moments and scary sound effects.

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