Fight Scene Sound Effects Issues

Fight sounds in film have nothing to do with reality. What you do is create sounds that have, if you'll pardon the pun, the proper emotional impact.

It's all about layers of sounds. So yes, the library sounds seem cheesy by themselves, you need to be stacking them. Most fight sounds are three or four layers - the "skin" sound, the impact sound, the "damage" sound and the "pain" sound. You smack your own skin or pound on pieces of meat for the "skin" sound. You beat on something large like an old sofa, a punching bag, sports balls (football, etc,) or melons/fruit (depending on the body part) for the deeper impact sound. And then there are specific "damage" sounds like a broken limb (breaking celery or pasta) or a crushed head (frozen lettuce/cabbage, smashed apples, etc.). The pain is done with ADR - grunts, groans, oohfs, etc.

You will have to ADR the vocalizations of the person throwing the punch/kick, and both of the protagonists will be breathing heavily. You'll need wood sounds of their weapons colliding, and whooshes as they are swung. You'll also need to have cloth sounds and, of course, all of the footwork.

All this comes together during the mix to sound "realistic" which, of course, it is not. A very subtle mix is reality, an over the top mix is martial arts, a very over the top mix is comedy.

Foley is an art form, and I'm still learning to do it well. I generally get what I want, but not nearly as fast as a true Foley artist. The key is a large prop collection, some good mics and a reasonably dead room plus the ability to think out of the box and time to experiment.

Good luck and have fun!

Nice work Alcove.

Thanks for all the info Alcove, it was extremely helpful. Now iMovie had a built in "baseball bat" sound effect, which I dubbed over the actual colliding of the two weapons, and it sounded great. For the person getting their head slammed against the wall, I actually went back to that wall today and slammed against it with a basketball (I didn't throw it against it, just used 2 hands to slam it into the wall), that worked well. The last effect I need to create is at the end of the fight where the protagonist takes his staff and whips the other guy across the back with it.

Ok, for the staff to the guys back, I actually just put my hand right up to my mic, and slammed my arm really hard with a pencil. It stings, but it's worth it haha. All I got was a really quick "tick" sound, which sounds very natural right as it hits him.

Wow... I was going to say something, but i think Alcove summed everything up pretty well...

And may i just emphasize the "have fun" bit of his comment =)

Yeah I just experimented with lots weird stuff, and eventually got some great sounding effects. Thanks Alcove