There is something beautiful about watching skin and flesh get cut open on the silver screen. The image alone is usually enough to get stomachs churning in the audience, and my girlfriend usually can't even watch it happen (I'm pretty positive she isn't the only one to bury her head in her hands to try to avoid the gore). I think it's because it is a pain that we all can imagine. We all know the feeling of getting cut, so watching it happen to a character on screen, slowly and methodically exposing his innards, isn't hard for many to quickly imagine the same happening to them.
Unfortunately for us sound people, the sound of cutting ones skin is kind of a silent affair. It's dull and somewhat disappointing that something that visually looks disgusting can, at the same time, sound so normal. Luckily for us, we are Hyper Realists and we ignore what is normal and do what we can to intensify emotion through sound.
For this sound effect, we will wrap, stab, slice, squeeze, squash, scratch, and bite fruit. Fruit is a great body sound substitute, because it has skin that we can pierce, and is filled with flesh that is moist and happens to make some nasty sounds.
You will need some fruit of your choosing (probably a firm fruit like an apple and a squishy one like an orange), saran wrap, a knife, and some paper towels to keep the work space clean.
We start by wrapping the fruit (in this case a Golden Delicious apple) in saran wrap. This adds to the outermost layer and helps us get more of a "skin" sound. We need to get a base sound, a nice slice to start things off. I might have recording about 10 different slices and used the one I liked the best. You might want to try stabbing (carefully!) the fruit a few times to get an entrance sound, but it all depends on the image you are trying to match. After I had my slice sound, I cut a whole into the fruit and used my finger to scratch the flesh. I also decided to bite into the apple to see what that could sound like. You want to be careful if you use this sound to not let it sound like someone biting into an apple, this is a distinct sound that is easy to pick up on.
Once you have all of your sounds, layer them together in your DAW to your liking. I attempted to have them start at different times to get different texture throughout the slice. I also needed heavy eq'ing on each effect to really achieve a nice blend. A problem I ran into was the saran wrap causing a popping sound. Compressing the track solved the issue, and the pops became more nice texture.
The only problem I had with my sound effect, was that it wasn't gross enough. It needed a bit more wetness to really feel human. Cue the orange. All you need to do is peel it, and squeeze it a bit. Again, this all really depends on what the image on the screen looks like, and the image and the sound will play off of each other to really create something amazing and grotesque.
Unfortunately for us sound people, the sound of cutting ones skin is kind of a silent affair. It's dull and somewhat disappointing that something that visually looks disgusting can, at the same time, sound so normal. Luckily for us, we are Hyper Realists and we ignore what is normal and do what we can to intensify emotion through sound.
For this sound effect, we will wrap, stab, slice, squeeze, squash, scratch, and bite fruit. Fruit is a great body sound substitute, because it has skin that we can pierce, and is filled with flesh that is moist and happens to make some nasty sounds.
You will need some fruit of your choosing (probably a firm fruit like an apple and a squishy one like an orange), saran wrap, a knife, and some paper towels to keep the work space clean.
We start by wrapping the fruit (in this case a Golden Delicious apple) in saran wrap. This adds to the outermost layer and helps us get more of a "skin" sound. We need to get a base sound, a nice slice to start things off. I might have recording about 10 different slices and used the one I liked the best. You might want to try stabbing (carefully!) the fruit a few times to get an entrance sound, but it all depends on the image you are trying to match. After I had my slice sound, I cut a whole into the fruit and used my finger to scratch the flesh. I also decided to bite into the apple to see what that could sound like. You want to be careful if you use this sound to not let it sound like someone biting into an apple, this is a distinct sound that is easy to pick up on.
Once you have all of your sounds, layer them together in your DAW to your liking. I attempted to have them start at different times to get different texture throughout the slice. I also needed heavy eq'ing on each effect to really achieve a nice blend. A problem I ran into was the saran wrap causing a popping sound. Compressing the track solved the issue, and the pops became more nice texture.
The only problem I had with my sound effect, was that it wasn't gross enough. It needed a bit more wetness to really feel human. Cue the orange. All you need to do is peel it, and squeeze it a bit. Again, this all really depends on what the image on the screen looks like, and the image and the sound will play off of each other to really create something amazing and grotesque.
Great post! I definitely enjoyed reading it as I am a fan of horror films. I do agree that something as scary as watching someone’s flesh being torn open can have a weak sound in real life (not that I would know though never experienced that happening in real life). I found it interesting how you could use fruit as your objects to create the sound. While I was listening to your created flesh ripping sounds, I could imagine a zombie eating someone with his grunting going as well, I think all of that combined really does add to the tension of it.
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