I make no bones about it. The process of finding and acquiring necessary sound effects for Madison is my least favorite part of creating the show. We have no budget, so I lean on free online resources for all of our sound effects. You can lose a week of your life combing through those sites trying to find what you need. In some cases, there are too many options for one simple sound effect and the rabbit hole becomes being convinced you need to sample all of them to find the perfect one. But more often than not, the key word search will kill you. I do not understand why the key word searches are so obscure. For example, there are no straightforward “door slam” sound effects. I tried that one. “Slam” does not compute. So I spend my day trying to come up with creative word choice alternatives for “slam” and losing the precious hours I have left on this earth.
Why I picked this subject for our Halloween and “Dracula” month is because of the unique challenges of finding the SFX for this one. Now, there are many audio dramas out there who proudly create their own SFX from scratch. All power to them. I mentioned the no budget, right? While I’m happy with our little recording set up in our apartment, we do not have the space to record effects, and we certainly don’t have the equipment necessary to go out into the world to record. But those aren’t excuses. I am good with what we ultimately use. But “Dracula” posed some unique sounds. There are enough haunted houses out there that things like a coffin opening, an iron gate creaking and a werewolf howl (not a REAL wolf… those I couldn’t find!) were available. But the hardest one… staking a vampire.
One thing to keep in mind with SFX for audio dramas is that the REAL sound of the REAL thing doesn’t often translate to sounding like the thing. Certainly guns are a good example of this. Hollywood learned long ago that the “pop” of a real gun isn’t the big grand moment they wanted to portray in shoot outs, so from the beginning of “foley,” gun sounds have been given a lot more gravitas. And as audiences, we’ve all grown to expect the Hollywood version as truth. So much so, how many news interviews do bystanders say, “It just sounded like a car backfiring…” because REAL guns don’t sound like Hollywood guns. Oh, and a little side note about the term “foley.” The technique was created by a man named Jack Foley for FILMS. And if you DARE call the sound effects in old time radio, “foley,” you will have the wrath of OTR fanatics to deal with. Yeah… learned that the hard way.
So, staking a vampire. I ultimately combined several different sounds to make the staking sound. One brilliant person I found online recorded themselves taking a fistful of dried spaghetti noodles and twisting them to snap as “bone breaking.” It’s fabulous! And no one has to go to the ER. I found two different varieties of mud sloshing and altered them on each swing. One was footsteps, another was someone’s hands in mud. That “squish” really read to me as a fleshy heart being pierced. (Having never heard a real heart being pierced, it was purely speculative). I also found a sound of someone pounding a fence stake into mud so there could be the mallet pounding the stake. Lastly, a fist pounding wood. It gave a clear reading force of the mallet on the stake. Voila! Dead vampire.
Ultimately, I love what we end up with and I do enjoy editing the sounds into the show to fill out the world. And I’ve got quite a little sound library growing. I don’t expect I’ll ever have an episode that I don’t have to find some new FX, and I will grumble my way through the process, but it makes me happy to give the scenes a bit more “reality” by including them. The sound effects performers of OTR were definitely craftspeople. Those shows would be hollow and empty without their work. So I’ll keep combing endlessly through SFX sites to bring Madison’s world to life.
-Chrisi (aka Madison)
