Greetings. This is Kyle Bondo, the writer and director behind pause for dramatic effect. And this is between the pauses, the making of pause for dramatic effect. And today, I wanna talk about special effects or fully, if you would. I know that this is a challenge to create sound effects, to create good sound effects, to create believable sound effects.
And the challenge is twofold because, 1, you want something that sound realistic, but you only have so much time, so much money, so much there's so many resources to create really good sound effects. So how do you do it? In an audio drama, how do you create something? That sounds realistic. Well, you'd be surprised. First off, there's a lot of resources out there that you could use for fully. And there is And it's the it's it's the Hollywood version of creating sound effects to amplify
or signify something that may or may not be reality. A good good example of this is people punching each other. A lot of times the actual act of punching a human doesn't doesn't make the sound you think it makes. Because in the movies, it's it's kind of anticlimactic to punch somebody and get this kind of all. It's not really that big of deal. So what do what do special effects or sound effects people do? Well, they use like a baseball bat or a 2 by 4 and they slap a a giant slap a beef.
That makes a really good whack sound. It sounds like someone really getting nailed. But is it real? No. So there's a lot of things you're gonna do with special effects that may not sound like real things when you're doing them, a case in point rain and you're dropping a rice onto a table. Might not I mean, that's got nothing to do with rain, but in your ear, it may sound like rain.
Strangeing like this. Also, sometimes creating your own sound effects gives you an appreciation for the actual effect itself. In case in point, the sound effect that I used to create a Douglas Dyer's shopping cart because he's a homeless vet, was an actual shopping cart. I grabbed a shopping cart in a
in a parking lot of a local grocery store, and I just walked the shopping cart. In fact, I grabbed 2 or 3 different ones. They get 2 different 3 or 7 sounds and recorded them, recorded the microphone close far away, kinda get a good, you know, good sampling of special effects. And creating that gave me a good sense of how hard this is. I did 7 takes of shopping cart. I only used 1, and the shopping cart is only in episode 1 for about 6 seconds.
That's it. And I think I used it once in another another chapter. That's it. You create this. You go through all this work to pull into the parking lot, pull out your audio gear, grab a shopping cart, put the microphone in there, go back and forth, have people look at you like, what the heck is that guy doing? And record your sound effect. Then go back and listen to the sound effect to see if it's any good
because you might have, you know, the first time I did the first shopping cart, I didn't even hit record. Yeah. I know or no. I hit record. I had the wrong microphone selection on my handheld recorder selected.
So it wasn't recording the onboard mic. So I had basically, you know, 2, 3 minutes of dead air. These are the kind of things that you learned that you're doing sound effects is you're gonna have to put on headphones in here that actually sounds like or gonna have to make sure it's actually recording. You're gonna have to be in an environment that may or may not be suitable, a good point with doing the shopping cart. And we've got cars to go by. People talking. There was all You don't realize how noisy the world is until you start recording things.
Then the world is incredibly recording. It's just loud everywhere. Just recording a podcast by itself with air conditioning, dog barking, birds chirping, galon knowing. That's 1 thing. But when you go to create a sound effect for an audio drama out in the world, The whole world comes alive. You cannot imagine how busy and loud and noisy a parking lot to a grocery store is at 9PM. You think
Who's shopping at this time? Well, there's lots of people shopping. It's amazing to understand how frustrating it could be to wait for the perfect opportunity to record a shopping cart. And that's just 1 of the sound effects I've used. I I was pulling from historical documentation, a lot of Department of Defense videos of actual combat
to record machine gun sounds because I wanted realistic sounding weapons fire. I didn't want the sound effects with them fire because I look through libraries of sound effects. They all sound like synthetic. I wanted that real, you know, it took a took a sound sound of a machine gun firing of an actual, you know, automatic weapon that the marine would actually use.
That's the kind of thing that you want. In your in your audio drama, some real some reality, but sometimes the reality doesn't record very well, especially for your recording off a video into your audio platform into your digital audio workstation. The quality of the video can greatly diminish the sound effect, but it depends on how you wanna use it. A lot of times, some of the sound effects I use are just kind of in the background.
Then there's the third way to do sound effects. And that's, of course, to buy them. Now, you can go to creative commons and there's a lot of places to sound libraries and get some free stuff. But if you really want some specific sound, music is probably the best ones of this. You're gonna have to license some stuff. And I am a big fan of audiojungle.net. That's where I if I'm gonna get music, I go there. Why? They have licensing for projects like this.
And with a project like this, a $20 piece of cello music is worth its weight in gold than having to dig through creative commons and find something that's of of any value or the kind of mood I wanna set.
The same thing with the the tube and throat singing. I started the podcast doing it myself. I was doing throw tobin throat singing in my closet, you know, the I a or no kind of thing. And it just didn't sound right. So instead, I kind of changed my ear my ear to say, well, that's the far away version. It doesn't have to sound right right yet. But when the bad guy gets really close, I was like, man, it's gotta sound better. And I went and bought a piece of tobin throat sinking for $20.
And so there's some expenses to this. And when maybe in a later episode of be between the pause, we'll talk about the cost of producing a a audio drama. But right now, you can you can go and purchase some things that are just out of the box. And audiojungle.net has a ton of license, royalty free type things that you can use, and that's, you know, I'm just a fan. I'm not a you know, I'm an affiliate link or anything. Maybe I should.
But you can get a lot of things where you're just looking for a specific mood or a specific tone go to something like that if you have the money and buy a couple pieces of sound. Because I get like the cell of music I use in my app podcast, I have 2 different pieces of cell of music. 1 was like a little $2 1, 1 was like a $20 1. I reuse them over and over and over again. To set the mood for flashbacks. I use it from the opening and intro and outro's.
And then the throat music is just the bad guy. That's his bad guy's theme song. In a sense, every time you hear the bad guy, it's a I a o kind of thing. Right? And then just recently, I found an audio clip that is the of the angels. And that's a whole new part of the product of the audio drama as it goes forward. So there's that too. And then sometimes you don't need anything at all. Wrestling of papers can just be your microphone on some papers. Some of these things are very simple to create.
You could have even this the, you know, the thumping of a desk. You know, the is just my hand banging the countertop. And maybe that is enough. Sometimes the stuff you do just out of the box thinking is better than anything else. I did a prop for 1 of the aircraft I think in 1 of the flashback scenes from episodes like chapter 3 or 4. And maybe it knows too. Anyway, is is my bedroom fan just played at high speed or were the microphone really close? Or I I adjusted the speeds to get it covered.
Oh. Okay. Hello cop airplanes. All that stuff. All that stuff is like fans and things around my house. You can get very creative for free. All you have to do is have a microphone that can record these things in a quiet environment. Microphone's easy. Quiet environment turns out a challenge, but you can do that too.
Anyway, that's kind of my my, you know, quick little behind the napkin of how special effects are made for an audio drama. I hope you really enjoyed this. And I really appreciate you listening to Pause for dramatic effect. And I look forward to releasing chapter 10 here very shortly.
And I wanna thank you for being a part of this journey for Ned Pop homo, the national podcast post month, where I decided for an experiment to create an audio drama for daily podcasts, which is kind of insane, but kind of cool. Anyway, I'm Kyle Bondo, and thank you for listening to between the pauses, the making of pause for dramatic effect. For more tales of woe, please visit pause or dramaticeffect.com.