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Her answer is blunt: Nothing is really that difficult if youre a Foley artist.
She simply asks herself a series of questions How is the sound moving?
What is it moving against?
What does it feel like?
(More often than not: dried noodles and a wet chamois.)
Without a convincingsuuuuuuuckto go along with a demon birth scene, the fantastical narrative falls apart.
And we had to make the sound of the lungs filling, because hes alive.
Then I picked it up by the middle, and, as it pulled off, there was ascchhhheeew.
Like, Boy, I worked hard on that!
We did happen to have a pig head available at that time.
I think I used a wooden stump to hit it, and it was pretty grisly.
You know when you hit something, often you get little particles that fall?
Its like, Oh boy, I need to wash up after that!
We would do some hits on the ground and some up in the air.
So we went crazy with the pigs head.
It was great, because it had the weight and it had the flesh and it was very gross.
It was pretty worked over by the end.
I was happy to get rid of that pigs head.
So those little things go a long way.
Then it gets into the muscle of the chicken and then eventually to the bones.
I buy raw chickens frequently and ham hocks and steaks.
They work great for the gory human stuff, but bones breaking are usually some kind of a vegetable.
Some people think its pedestrian to just go to the celery.
It sounds really real.
So Im a big fan of the celery.
Does that make sense?
It was like a womb POV.
That was pretty crazy.
You really have to narrow it down.
But what I ended up doing is taking different layers of my own voice.
One of them was my voice through a wrapping paper tube, like a long cardboard tube.
It ended up working pretty well layered with other sounds.
I feel like one of the things that you really have to play on is the emotional content.
Youre really trying to trigger something in people.
People in real life are most scared of people, you know what I mean?
Trying to trigger those emotions is, I think, the key to any good horror film.
Its really trying to get under the persons skin psychologically more than anything else.
That adds an element that helps it stay scary without sounding cheesy or cartoony.
Thats a little advantage I have.
So I was able to branch off doing custom creatures for some huge films.
Well, they were having a hard time making the voice unique.
Then Ive done a bunch of stuff after, like the aliens inIndependence Day.
One of them was the sound of all the little moving parts like stone rubbing stone.
Ryan Collison, Alchemy Post Sound:They wanted to have an ancient sound to it, you know?
They were very specific about not metallic.
Leslie:But it was interesting, the first time I saw it, Im thinkingclockwork.
Even if it was subtly different, it needed that contrast.
Bruckner was thinking of stone like ancient runes.
Were lining these up and rubbing them around.
This is not what we want.
I was like, Okay.
I drew a little inspiration from theTransformersmovie when it came to the box.
We wanted to give every moving part its own space.
Leslie:It was about …
Ryan:… the organization.
Leslie:It was about organizing a palette of sounds.
A palette of different materials that were going to use for this box.
The box changes seven or eight times, I cant remember.
4to create its sound.
Keeping notes was a big part of that.
That was also a very challenging part.
I think there were four or five cenobites.
These creatures have skin pulled from their face.
Their arms are like raw muscle tissue and flesh.
Ric Schnupp wanted a really distinctive sound between the cenobites.
It wasnt just a flappy wet skin kind of thing.
We keep everything written down in longhand in composition books.
Its hard to lose a composition book.
I misplace my phone constantly, but my composition book is always around.
I keep track of all the different sounds through that.
Nobody really had a firm idea as we went into the project what they wanted them to sound like.
I had such good fun doing the kelpie.
I was in the river pit, arms full of plants and seaweed, splashing around like a mermaid.
And while every job is a standout challenge, Im quite a big fan of director Alex Garland.
Since I like to make big noises,Ex Machinawas a real turnaround for me.
Even though we werent close to the glass, the sound was bouncing off it.
We also created a robot that didnt sound like a robot, and created a new sound for skin.
