It is exceedingly rare that film crews take with them the necessary equipment to record sound effects live. This statement is essentially a blanket truth for amateur directors: that tiny digital camera microphone is simply not going to cut it. The result is that most directors go about putting sound into their productions in much the same way they sort out production music. Sound Effects are therefore a mix of sourced, manipulated and recorded audio events, selected for their relative cost and effectivenesstrade-off.

Buying in the sound effects for the majority of a film’s scenes is a fairly standard film production practice. Pain grunts, gunshots and sirens are among those effects typically purchased rather than produced in house: doing so simply saves money. Similarly, consider what kind of sounds on film are common, and then consider how many of them occur regularly and can be easily and inexpensively sourced. One example that occurs almost immediately is the use of explosions in film. You’re barely an action film director if you don’t have an explosion, but the high street is thankfully not full of exploding office blocks and fuel tankers.

Of course, if you have lots of explosions in a film, it’s worth using audio mixing to get some variation in there. Mixing is also important in the creation of sounds we simply cannot source, that may simply not even exist. Science Fiction and horror films commonly feature manipulated sounds that are derived from worldly sources, which is something the visual side of the ‘alien’ has always riffed upon. By mixing together a moose call and radically altered hyena’s laugh, you could come up with something entirely new. And finally, there are those sounds that ‘mix’ using real objects, where, not unlike experimental arms of Indie production music, everyday objects can be employed to make sounds in the ‘Foley’ process. One famous example is the use of a piece of paper to make the ‘whoosh’ of a futuristic door.

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