richardkingsound

I accidentally crashed a Mercedes Benz once and got an incredible impact sound. We crashed into an airplane hangar within 2 feet of an airplane propellor.

We revved up an electric car so high that the engine seized up and I got a great shuddering clunk sound.

We dropped a concrete k-rail on a car, inadvertently crushing the microphone inside. We got a great crash sound up until the mic was destroyed.

These are accidents I would not suggest repeating, but we got some great sounds (and nobody got hurt).

I often get happy accidents working with plugins, pushing a particular parameter to an extreme.

The horn from War of the Worlds was sort of an accident born of a lot of experimentation and trial and error. At first the elements we used (didgeridoo, bowed metal, other horn instruments, etc) didn't sound scary or enormous enough, so I ran them through Altiverb and cranked the shit out of a particular parameter and it distorted and it made a huge sound like an overloaded PA horn.

Chris had the genius idea of having the plane's engine winding up instead of sputtering as it goes down. I put a billiard ball in my dryer at home to get random banging to simulate like a crank shaft is broken loose. He's going 100 knots so at that speed hitting water is like hitting concrete. The penultimate moment had to be huge. That's a sound we worked on for a long time to try to give it the biggest metal crack we could make.

Loud sounds like explosions are more startling and effective if they're preceded by a little silence. For instance, the scene where the British soldiers are hiding in the metal trawler which the Germans begin using as target practice. It's shocking because it's a fairly quiet scene.

Miles Davis, John Coltrane, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Captain Beefheart, The Who, Aaron Copeland, and Beethoven.

It's always a particular sound that makes a scene difficult.

I'd say the Bat from The Dark Knight Rises. We didn't want it to sound like a helicopter, it needed more of a flangey whir. It was a long process to try to figure out how to accomplish that without making it just sound like a big fan.

I know an even better one. The Stuka siren for Dunkirk I worked on for the entire duration of the movie until the very end. It was a long trial and error process since the sound had to be created from scratch (no Stukas to record).

The guns in the opening sequence in the town of Dunkirk were a combination of great production sound(!) and the German machine guns that we recorded. The production gun sounds had a great crack and had the benefit of the natural reverb of the narrow cobblestone street. They were also played very loud, which makes them abrasive and shocking. They also sound harsh and raw because there's no sound absorption on that street, it's like a little stone canyon, which makes it bright and abrasive. So we got lucky with production guns in that scene.