Making Famous Sound Effects

What do tasers, dried oranges, and lawn rollers have in common? They’re all used to create movie sound effects in the most utterly bizarre and unexpected ways imaginable. Seriously, you’ll never guess what cinematic sounds those dried oranges are repurposed to create. As it turns out, most of us moviegoers overlook one of cinema’s most important elements: the sound effects.

From whooshing lightsabers and gallant knights, to screaming aliens, animal impersonations and beyond, let's explore how they make the most famous sound effects in Hollywood, and even try to make some for ourselves!

Foley Sound

How do movies handle sound to begin with? When movies are filmed, those big, long boom microphones you see in behind-the-scenes footage are focused on capturing the actors’ dialogue. The director and sound engineers will do their best to cut out other distracting background noises like footsteps, body movement, and other assorted environmental sounds that might make hearing the words difficult.

It’s a Foley Artist’s job to recreate these background sounds, or replace them with newer, more impactful sounds - in a studio, so they can be added back into the movie with fully-adjustable volume levels when the movie is being edited. Paired with an ingenious combo of audio mixing effects, from equalizers, compressors and reverbs, to distortion effects and beyond, the end results of these foley-artist-and-sound-mixer team-ups are absolutely mind-blowing.

With Foley artists getting their name from American sound-effects artist Jack Donovan Foley, these particular sound experts are wizards of scene-building, and when they’re doing their strange, fascinating jobs correctly, you wouldn’t even notice.

Foley artists will own a variety of shoes to perfectly simulate the footwear worn by the character on-screen, and their studio will often contain a "Foley Pit" that lets them walk on different substances like sand and dirt.

Sometimes, mimicking the characters on-screen requires some incredibly specific movements, like donning plastic packaging to mimic a scientist in a hazmat suit, or stepping on a beanbag to simulate boots crunching through deep snow.

Jurassic Park Sounds

A Foley Artist’s job isn’t just about walking on the spot, and when they work on a sci-fi movie, they have to create sounds that don’t actually exist, like a hatching dinosaur.

Velociraptors are long extinct, but Jurassic Park’s foley team brought them back to life in this scene by slowly crushing an ice cream cone, as I attempted to recreate here.

creating Jurassic park dinosaur egg hatching sound

However, the raptors in Jurassic Park don’t stay little for long, and when they grow up, they communicate to each other with unusual, now-iconic barks.

The raptors in this scene are terrifying, but incredibly, their barks are actually the sound of two tortoises mating at Marine World, an old aquatic theme park in California. The original recording sounds a little something like the noises this tortoise made while having some mistaken-identity-laden fun with a tree stump.

But back to raptors, when these Jurassic Park icons grunt at their prey, like this in the clip below, you’re really hearing a horse’s heavy breathing. And when the raptors are in pursuit, you’re hearing the sounds of an adolescent dolphin and a hissing goose, combined. These sounds aren’t particularly scary alone, but when the sound designers combined them, they created a monster that sounds completely prehistoric.

Let’s move from dinos to a more modern cinematic animal. Movie’s will often feature birds flying in the background, and a foley artist can recreate their movement by, hilariously, flapping a pair of gloves together.

You may be wondering why foley artists don’t just record real birds to achieve this effect. To record a real animal, you’d need the creatures to act exactly like the ones on-screen, and record them without capturing any background noise. This is difficult and expensive, so most movies will simply go foley. These artists have a whole toolkit of other inventive techniques, like putting those gloves back on and rubbing a sand-covered floor to impersonate a slithering snake.

When recreating sounds made by animals, foley artists generally try to make the most realistic sounds that they can. However, sometimes sound designers forgo authenticity and focus on creating the most dramatic sound-effect for the scene.

One key example of this comes from the Lion King, a Disney movie full of big cats singing about the circle of life and roaring. Mufasa’s roars are incredibly powerful, but these sound weren’t taken from a lion, and you’re really listening to a dude called Frank Welker screaming into a trash can.

The movie follows lions with human personalities, so Disney wanted each one to have expressive roars with real emotion. To achieve this, they enlisted acclaimed voice actor Frank Welker, allowing him to add a bit of humanity to the cats by performing growls, while using a metal trash-can’s natural reverberation to make them sound larger-than-life.

From one roaring predator to another, the T-Rex sounds in Jurassic Park are some of the greatest Foley triumphs of all time. Suitably, its massive footsteps are actually falling redwood trees, and its breath is captured from a whale’s blowhole.

However, some parts of the monster’s sound design are surprisingly small-scale, like its famous roar, which was built around the call of a baby elephant. While developing the roar, sound designers lowered the pitch of the baby elephant recording, before combining it with growls made by a lion and a bellowing alligator, producing the full palette of T-Rex vocalizations.

Well, almost the full palette. The foley team still had a few more ideas in the bank. Take the T-Rex ambush scene, for example.

One sound designer noticed old Rexy shaking its head back and forth like a dog playing with a toy. So, they recorded themselves playing with a Jack Russell, capturing its growls. As a result, when Rexy chows down in Jurassic Park, you’ll hear the distinct sound of an excited dog, proving that the monster is nothing more than a big puppy.

Star Wars Sounds

The Star Wars franchise is full of famous sound effects, and many of those were created by legendary sound designer Ben Burtt. Burtt has worked on Star Wars since the very beginning, and when it came time to create the sounds for the iconic lightsaber, he started by recording a humming movie projector like the one in the video below.

Ben then built on this sound by taking a microphone and holding it up to an old-fashioned TV, which created a buzzing feedback. These elements formed the lightsaber, but Ben knew that when the weapon was swung through the air, the sound would have to vary. He solved this by playing the buzzing sounds through a speaker, and moving a microphone in front of it, creating changes in intensity in time with the characters’ movements.

When Ben combined these sounds, the lightsaber was complete, leaving him to work on another iconic weapon: the blasters.

Incredibly, Ben developed this iconic sound by accident whilst hiking in Pennsylvania. As he walked under a radio tower in the Pocono Mountains, his backpack caught on a steel guy wire, making a loud twang. Burtt loved the sound, so he later took his recording equipment to a similar radio tower near LA and hit its wires with a wrench, creating the sound for every blaster in Star Wars.

Once the weapons of Star Wars were finished, Ben had to work on the movie’s starships.

The tie fighter’s screech is iconic, and unbelievably, the sound was taken from a trumpeting elephant in a 1958 movie called The Roots of Heaven.

This audio is one of the few Star Wars sounds that Burtt didn’t create, however, his innovative, left-field choice to use the elephants clearly paid off, as the Tie Fighter’s animalistic screech has become one of the most distinctive sounds in movie history.

Knights Sound Design

Blasters, laser swords and spacecraft aside, sound designers often have to work on sounds that aren’t so futuristic. A brave knight riding a horse, for example.

Accurately creating the sound of horses is a common job for foley artists, but it’s a process that requires several steps. First, they’ll work on the horse’s hooves by hitting a hard object against the ground in time with its movements.

Then, the foley artist will mimic the horse’s saddle and reigns by shuffling chains and leather.

Then, if the horse is being ridden by a brave knight, they’ll channel their inner ‘sir-scrap-a-lot,’ by holding some scrap metal against their bodies and bouncing up and down.

These sounds aren’t very convincing on their own, and frankly just seem incredibly weird to watch, but when they’re combined, they sound remarkably like a galloping horse.

Fight Sound Design

Let’s move from swords and saddles to a good old-fashioned fistfight. The action genre is built around people punching each other in the face, and a foley artist will often create these sounds by hitting slabs of raw meat.

So turns out you can get paid to beat your meat, after all! This method is common, but Emmy nominated foley artist Sanaa Kelley shows that you don’t have to visit the butcher shop to create the effect, by using a boxing glove, a suitcase and some denim instead.

The hollowness of the suitcase creates a great natural thickness to the sound, providing another example of the scrappy ingenuity of our Foley heroes.

But superhuman body parts need to make sounds too, and superhero movies require equally creative Foley action. When Wolverine first popped out his signature claws on-screen back in 2000, foley artists combined the sounds of pulling a knife out of a sheath, with a chicken carcass being torn it apart. The resulting sound is both metallic and fleshy, and was utilized throughout Fox’s X-Men franchise. It could even be re-used in X-Men 2 for the adamantium-clawed villain, Lady Deathstrike. Chicken truly is the most versatile meat!

Of course, movie fights, whether with claws or fists, often lead to injuries, and when a character in a movie breaks an arm or a leg, the foley artists have to recreate the gruesome sound. This effect might sound painful, but it’s actually created by snapping a large handful of celery at the exact moment that the character is injured.

Different bones require different sound effects. When Terminator 2’s sound team worked on simulating a trampled skull, they took, of all things, a pile of pistachios and crushed them with their hand.

This isn’t the only time that Terminator 2’s sound team raided the kitchen to create an effect. During the movie, Sarah Connor is chased by a shapeshifting liquid-metal robot, the T-1000. When the T-1000 is shot, bullets pass through his liquid body, making a wet plop as they travel out the other side.

To create this sound, the foley artists needed something gloopy with a bit of weight behind it, and they achieved the effect by taking a drinking glass and dropping it into a giant bucket of yogurt.

Kiss Sound Design

So far we’ve looked at gunshot wounds and broken bones, so let’s move to the romantic side of Hollywood. Many will find cheesy Rom-coms sickening, but the way foley artists work on romantic scenes is even grosser. If two characters kiss in a scene, foley artists aren’t expected to start making out in a recording booth. They’ll simply kiss their own hands to recreate the sound.

I’m sure the foley artists working on James Cameron’s Titanic got very familiar with their hands while working on the movie’s long list of loves scenes, but spoiler alert, the boat sinks at the end, leaving the star-crossed lovers floating in the icy Atlantic ocean.

Ice Sound Design

As Rose moves her head in this scene, her frozen hair peels off the wooden door she’s floating on. This makes a subtle background sound, that the Foley team created by freezing an entire head of lettuce before peeling its leaves. This sound is incredibly subtle, and demonstrates the attention-to-detail of movie sound teams, but sound designers also work on far larger pieces of ice.

The sound of this cracking glacier is pretty powerful, but it can be recreated with surprisingly small props.

As the herb is scraped across a dried orange, it sounds just like ice cracking, but it still doesn’t have the power of a crumbling glacier. As a result, foley artists will digitally edit this sound, using distortion effects, frequency equalization, and reverb, to make it a better fit for the scene.

Prop Replication

Audio editing can clearly be a helpful tool, but foley artists will often aim to recreate a sound completely practically, with minimal editing trickery. Sometimes, this requires the use of crazy custom props. Take, for example, a scene of a woman tapping her long nails on a surface.

As a man with short fingernails, you’d expect foley artist Stefan Fraticelli to struggle recreating this scene. However, Stefan can channel his inner diva whenever he wants, with the help of his homemade fingernail gloves.

This outfit allows him to perfectly impersonate long fingernails, even impersonating texting.

But Stefan isn’t the only foley artist who creates sound effects with some prop replication. Check this clip below:

When foley artist Aleksa Colakovic attempted to create the sounds of this gunman, he decided to impersonate the character, by picking up a bag with metal detailing, donning it like a gun and copying the character’s every movement.

Of course, this technique and others like it can be used to create the sounds of any gunman on the move, including characters in video games like Fortnite. Thankfully, it’s a little safer than inviting a real crazed gunman into your recording booth.

Picking up a prop and throwing it around seems like a surprisingly simple way to simulate the sound of an armed gunman, but it turns out, a similar technique can be used to mimic an entire army.

The sound effects in the 1960 epic Spartacus were created by Jack Foley, the namesake and inventor of foley art. Jack created lots of the techniques used in modern foley, and when he was tasked with recreating the sound of this historic army, he reportedly pulled out his car keys. The metallic jangle of keys mimics the sound of jostling armor surprisingly well, and the drums in the soundtrack sync up for a powerful rhythm.

Stephen Spielberg's Sound Design

Using your keys to mimic an army is ingenious, but sometimes the best way to simulate the sound of a giant object is to use an equally large prop.

In this scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, a giant boulder chases Indiana Jones while crashing through an ancient tomb. Unfortunately, the sound designers didn’t have a boulder on-hand, so they were forced to recreate the sound by hauling a heavy lawn roller and a Honda station wagon to the top of a gravel hill, and letting them roll to the bottom.

creating sound for giant boulder chases Indiana Jones

Unsurprisingly the sounds of these heavy objects rolling down a slope sounded a lot like a boulder, providing the perfect audio for this scene. Let’s look at another Stephen Spielberg movie, moving onto an alien who just wants to phone home.

While working on E.T., Spielberg hired the foley artist Joan Rowe to make his alien sound, quote, ‘liquidy and friendly.’ After lots of experimentation, Rowe simulated the sound of the alien’s movement by shaking some liver and popcorn in a plastic tub, and manipulating a t-shirt filled with Jell-O. Every time E.T. moves, all 3 sounds are audible, and Rowe’s unique foley earned her two Oscars for sound design.

Food Foley

That Jell-o jiggle clip has probably made you hungry, so let’s explore how foley artists simulate the sound of fruit being eaten. In nature documentaries, the camera is usually too far from the wildlife to capture any real high-quality sounds, and foley artists have to fill in all the audio.

That’s right, whenever an animal eats on-screen, a foley artist like our old pal Stefan will snack on different foods to perfectly mimic their meal, letting them eat like a monkey or a horse. Let’s move from eating food to cooking, as we check out the sounds of delicious soup being cooked in Disney’s Ratatouille.

As Remy the Rat brings this soup to boil, you probably think you’re listening to herbs and vegetables bubbling away in a giant pan. However, this is the sound of blowing into a glass of water with a straw. This is exactly the method commonly used in Hollywood to recreate any bubbling liquid, from a witch’s cauldron to a chemistry experiment.

Foley artists also regularly work on scenes involving much larger bodies of water. Sound designers don’t usually get to take a trip to the beach to record these sounds, as high-end foley studios will often contain a large concrete pool to simulate sounds made in the sea or swimming pools.

Rain Sound Design

The most common use of water in movies is simulating the sound of rain. Sanaa Kelley of ReelFoleySound uses a watering can to mimic rainfall, and she’ll pour the water onto different materials depending on the scene.

If rain is falling on a car, she’ll pour the water onto a sheet of metal, but if the scene changes, she can easily swap the metal out for another material, like an umbrella. If a foley artist wants to recreate the sound of rain without getting their hands wet, they can achieve a similar effect with a frying pan, as demonstrated below by Charlie Cooke. Charlie specializes in finding new, inventive ways to create sound effects, and with his breakfast solution, Charlie proves food can be used for effects that sound great and smell even better.

Horror Movie Sound Design

Horror movies use a number of unique sound effects to terrify the audience, and one of the most iconic examples is a creaking floorboard in a haunted house.

A professional foley studio will generally contain a panel of creaky wood that allows them to accurately recreate the effect.

However, if you don’t have access to a foley studio, you can still recreate this sound at home, by applying pressure across a balloon, as demonstrated by Dutch Foley artist, Poolz.

A Quiet Place is a movie about blind aliens that listen for their prey with hypersensitive hearing. The movie’s sound designers wanted to create an echolocation effect to simulate the monsters’ hearing senses, which they wanted to sound simultaneously electrical and fleshy.

And how did they pull it off? By shocking a pile of grapes with a taser, of course! The sound designers slowed the sound of the Taser’s electrical pulses down to emphasize the clicks of the taser, and it provided the perfect noise for the monster’s echolocation.

Anyone else feeling like these Foley artists just get paid to mess around? There can’t be many jobs out there where electrocuting fruit is a daily occurrence.

Thankfully, some movie monsters are made in far simpler ways. The 2021 epic-movie Dune features an iconic gigantic Worm that swims underneath the sand on a desert planet and sucks in its prey.

The way that the sandworm swallows is monstrous, but the sound it emerges with is actually a foley artist called Mark Mangini sticking a microphone in his mouth and sucking in huge amounts of air. As the air passed right next to the mic it made a loud roaring sound, allowing Mike’s very human mouth to create the perfect Alien swallowing sound, with some audio effects processing, of course.

creating dune gigantic Worm sucking prey in sand sound

Keeping on the theme of giant alien creatures, while developing the Banshees in Avatar, James Cameron instructed his sound team to create the strangest creatures ever seen in film.

The banshees screams sound very alien, but it turns out, they’re composed of the hisses of young swans, the heavy breathing of horses and various reptile hisses. The resulting combo was a creature sound that couldn’t possibly exist on Earth, but actually, kind of already does!

By contrast, not all sci-fi and fantasy creatures are as large as Avatar’s banshees. While working on the fantasy movie Your Highness, the legendary Stefan Fraticelli recreated the flutter of a fairy’s wings, by taking some dried seaweed and placing it against a spinning bicycle wheel.

Minecraft Sound Design

With its creepy producers and terrible traffic, you don’t want to spend too much time in Hollywood. So, let’s leave the movie business for a moment, as we explore the sounds of the world’s best-selling video game, Minecraft.

That clip’s audio might sound like Steve walking across some grass blocks, but it’s actually can be created by running a toothbrush over your jeans, another common Foley method! Next, let’s look at damage.

This sound is bound to strike fear into the heart of any Minecraft player, and the loud whack can be recreated by taking a full matchbox, and hitting it repeatedly with a pen. Now that our health is low, we need to restore it with some food.

To make this sound, you can simply use a knife to aggressively cut up some Cheetos, creating a loud crunch. Once your health bar is full, you can go mining.

Breaking dirt blocks can be simulated by shaking some gravel and throwing it into a cardboard box. A similar technique is used to break sand.

Recreating this sound involves shaking gravel in a metal takeout container while digging, before quickly pulling a trash bag through your hands to break the block. With those blocks mined we can head back to our base and sit by the fire. To make this warm sound effect, all you need to do is crinkle some bubble wrap, while separately popping some bubbles to simulate the crackling of the fire.

The Red-Tailed Hawk & The Eagle Sound Design

Let’s head back to Hollywood now, and look at one of the most misleading sound effects used in film. When you picture a bald eagle flying over the American wilderness, you probably imagine it screeching like this.

It’s iconic, just about as typically American as riding a mobility scooter around a Wal-Mart. But in reality, America’s national avian symbol of strength and freedom actually sounds like a glorified seagull.

This misconception was created during the early days of Hollywood, when some unknown sound designers started replacing an eagle’s chirps with the screech of a red-tailed hawk.

These sound designers decided that the Hawk’s call was far more fitting for a powerful bird, and modern movies will still use it whenever Eagles are flying on screen, giving them the voice of a predator instead of a squeaky shopping cart.

The Lighthouse Farts

From that bird impersonation to tasered grapes, we’ve explored some of the weird and wonderful things that sound designers do to create sound effects. So, it seems right that we’d finish by looking at arguably the strangest thing a foley artist has ever done. The Lighthouse is a weird and wonderful psychological thriller from 2019 that follows two characters who repeatedly fart at each other.

Sound editor Damian Volpe has been very secretive about the creation of the movies maddening farts, but he’s confirmed that his team created them practically in his studio. Damian’s lack of an explanation means that we can’t be certain how the farts were created, however, his shame about their creation has generated one popular theory, the foley artists farted into a microphone and used the sound in a major Hollywood movie!

If you were amazed at the foleys and movie sound effects, you might want to read about movie secrets Hollywood that doesn't want you to know! Thanks for reading.