Part of my Uni project currently is to recreate the sounds of a film clip. I had had trouble deciding which clip to do... favourite film Anchorman?- but there was too much music running throughout sequences which made it hard to use. I settled on Wallace & Gromit!- the train scenes from The Wrong Trousers, but again it was full of music!
I needed something rich with sounds for me to go out and record. Happily enough, a scene from 'Up' was perfect. I had only seen a bit of the film but EVERYONE keeps telling me its the greatest in the world. The scene I chose is where the old man is sat outside his house, which is in the middle of a building site, so there are lots of digger trucks with their meaty engines driving around, metal is crashing about, bricks are being shifted, drills and pick axes galore and builders shouting across the site to each other. It's a foley artists playground!
I set to work with papa Chad, a tradesman himself, to firstly get some heavy duty drills trilling against a breezeblock on our patio at 11am. We then amassed an array of bricks from the 'leftovers from previous extensions' pile and clattered them about. The most hilarious bit was shifting three sink basin units from their storage along a concrete path - causing almighty clashing and metallic mayhem, but ultimately very resemblant to a heap of scrap metal being shunted across a construction site by a JCB. First class improvisation.
Projects like this are a right effort to sink teeth into - it took ages to continually re-listen to the clip (which is only 90s), and pick out all the various sounds in a big list. I sometimes forget we have projects like this going on when I am doing so much other work. Happily enough, getting started was good fun, and I'm excited to lay these newly recorded sfx down on protools next week.
One sequence that was really funny to record was some very faint but audible dialogue between construction workers in the scene. It's very faint and occurs over about 15s, we recorded all the lines in one go, which fitted together with surprising cohesion!- having said that, it was very amusing to draft in my sisters boyfriend and his hoarse morning voice, aforementioned papa chad and myself, with my mic some distance away to convey the faint nature of the sound.
