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.
You know, it's Josh in space.
Yeah that doo.
Yeah, the cliff works too.
I just 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, 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.
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 and 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 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.
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
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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. Then soon it 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 that, I kind of hoped they would get together.
Well they did, Buddy, your loves came true.
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.
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
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 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
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.
So they'll go out in the field.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
Yeah, they seem to love that stuff because they have, like Carte Blanc, to just go nuts and get creative.
Basically it's awesome.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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
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.
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
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. 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.
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, 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.
No, Well keep trying, Chuck.
I'm gonna maybe this will get to him.
It could attention Josh Harmon do this.
What about slapstick though I didn't know that even.
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 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.
I love it. Uh maybe yeah. Here, let's finish up with the Jazz Singer and then take a break. What do you say?
Mm hm?
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.
I don't know, I don't 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 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.
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.
All right, so we're just gonna walk away. Clip clop, clip clop clap.
Wait wait, oh no, we'll be right back.
You do a great machine gun and I have to say you and Scott Ackerman both do great machine gun sounds with your mouth.
That is from years and years of playing with M sixteen's in the woods.
What is that horrible instinct that little boys have.
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.
Let's pick up that stick and go.
Yeah.
See that was terrible.
No, that was pretty good. That was a modified sixteen.
All right? How about this bullet? Bullet bullet? Is it good?
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.
Yeah.
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 probably like ten 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 gonna be running around and screaming and shooting. I was like, everyone, find a position 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.
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, plane dodge in Billy Madison.
Oh. And not only did and I feel bad, I got a lot of satisfaction.
Of all Batman. Yeah, it was fun, all bat 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 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
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 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.
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, 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 cheering and water and the sounds of the steamboat and stuff like that. But you know, he's kind of saved the day.
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 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.
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 a credit for this, because there was no such thing as a Bowley artist till after him.
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.
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 sixties and Desilu was the first studio outside of Universal to call their folly room.
A folly room. Amazing.
What year was that, like sixty one or something like that, So.
Kind of right after it was done he got the honor.
Yeah, I guess that's amazing. Yeah, that does earns 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 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.
Neat right, Han's moment goes, I'm only thirty one years old.
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 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 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 way to go out.
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
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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
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 salary is obviously what you would use to make the sound when somebody falls down and breaks a bit.
Yeah, they SELLAR 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 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
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.
Yeah, and it's amazing that anybody can do that because it's really hard.
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 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 you'll hear this, by the way.
So oh yeah, I know I'm hoping you will.
Yeah, yeah, I knew it.
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 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.
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.
That's true.
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.
Yeah, I'm sure they're They're.
Using carrots before that, right.
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 even wrap my mind around that.
But what sound is it supposed to be.
A yawning chill 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 she.
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 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?
Yeah?
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 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 sound, right, you're gonna be like, what was that?
That's a tidman helmet? Right.
You wouldn't believe them if they told you that's right.
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, 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.
Use you wanted to take a break and come back and talk a little more about sound effects.
Let's do it. Show me open my door.
And then look out, Chuck grown out again.
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.
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.
Yeah, we 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? Got 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 well. 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 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.
But 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 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 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 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.
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. So it's been in over four hundred films.
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. That's pretty good one.
Yikes, what about Titanic? This is a good one.
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.
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, 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 who's going to email in, and I wanted to burst their bubble fight club.
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 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.
There's this movie called Berbery in sound studio back in twenty twelve. Did you see it?
I've never heard of it.
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?
Oh yeah, Toby Jones.
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 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.
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, like, this is the best we could get.
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.
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.
Oh, okay, and that was also Ben Burt Oh was it?
That makes sense?
Yeah? He did all the Internet Jones movies. He did et He was clearly a Spielberg Lucas guy.
Yeah he was. He was good and probably still is he still working?
I bet he is. He's in his midish seventies, 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 Ben, for Ben Bird, it was a Nagra reel to real 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 Pocono's and he went to 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 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 thing with something metal, it'll go cute.
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.
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 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.
Let's move on to the tie fighters.
How about that, let's do it.
Those are actually so the very famous.
Whaw 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 fighters sound being made, You'll say, yeah, that's an elephant.
I think you do a Chewbacca too, don't you know? I thought you used to do that.
Now my Chewbacca sounds like this wall, wall wall, It's like a nitross.
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 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,
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 fully 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 one other thing we should probably touch on real quicker nature documentaries.
Yeah, to get ready to be disappointed.
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. But by the nature of what they're making, they have to use sound effects to begin with.
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 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
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.
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.
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. That makes the whole thing better too. 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 anything else?
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 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, 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 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 fully artists can even watch movies I know 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, totally can't.
Enjoy simple pleasures in life because they know too much about it, you know, can't enjoy maloney 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 State of 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 his 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 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
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.
No, it was me, was it? It was one hundred percent of me.
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 crazy early and listened right away. Thanks and have a great day, and that is from Stephanie.
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.
Agreed.
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.
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