Fight Club and Fighting Foley

I've posted on just about everything except sound up until now, so its time to dive in. This beat-down on Jared Leto has been largely inspiration on the visualisation of the fight in our film, we also want it to be a one sided fight with Dean mounting Tom and battering away at his facey bits, with some point of view shots showing Dean's rage and Toms helplessness. If we can get our actor to look even half as brutalised as Jared Leto's 'beautiful' face we'll consider it a job well done.

What makes the brawls in David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) stand out so much are the visceral sounds made by each blow of the fist, which brings a whole new dynamic of realism that had seldom been achieved with the previous stock libraries that have become so familiar. 'Realism' is perhaps a little inaccurate as sound in film will always be exaggerated in some capacity for dramatic effect, and real punches seldom make the pounding thud that films have accustomed us to, but the aim of sound designers is to get under the audiences skin, to make these impact sounds resonate to the point they can be felt.

This is especially evident in Fight Club and Ren Klyce, Malcolm Fife and John Roesch eschewed the generic fighting effects in favour of creating a diverse library of bone crunching blows that they could orchestrate into a unique symphony of pain for each individual fight.

http://filmsound.org/studiosound/pp_fightclub.html

The above article details some of the unorthodox foley methods employed to get the unique sounds, such as 'Shattering chicken carcasses with baseball bats, cracking walnuts inside them, smacking around slabs of meat with pigs' feet, and then processing them... We've done it all, and as a result of this project our 'punch' library has become quite extensive.' 

I look forward to adopting a similar approach in my pursuit of foley effects, bludgeoning melons and chickens with blunt objects should be extremely fun, though it will pain me to waste food like that.

The article also details the problems encountered when bringing together the separate elements of foley, atmosphere and score tracks that may have worked well individually, but do not mesh well together. Whether the elements are all fighting for the same frequency spaces or the individuals responsible for their creation had differing visions, it is a common problem encountered on collaborative films that is often realised to late to rectify. As I'm responsible for all of these factors I will fortunately be able to experiment with what works together and what doesn't from the offset and should be able to amend anything that sounds amiss long before the final edit.

In his Sound Effects Bible Ric Viers offers several suggestions for creating a punching sound, from hitting items covered in leather with baseball bats to the more traditional meat route. He says 'Personally. I like to start with a leather impact and sweeten it with some vegetable splats to help emphasise the fleshy tone of the punch. you can also layer one breaks and other impacts underneath the punch.' (p. 255) In my previous experience in sound design I have found that layering several sounds together produces the most effective results, spanning the frequency range for a full sounding effect.

Viers also details how a body fall can be recreated using a leather jacket stuffed with a pillow and some phone books, which is something I will experiment with also. 

Viers, R. (2008) The Sound Effects Bible, California: Michael Wiese Productions