After completing an earlier post on designing a Fight, I thought I should do one on designing a car chase. Its possible these ideas also translate to Space and the Skies. Its mostly about movement on screen and how to keep it interesting.
I just finished a great two-car chase for Lawrence Ribeiro called Part Deux - The Chase. You can find it here, on You Tube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a91Q_SKcCdU&t=3s
Had a blast. Here’s some of my observations on how to create sound for a better car chase.
Create and Aural Aesthetic. Before one sits down to start the edit, it’s important to decide what aural aesthetic the sequence calls for: Penzoil hyper-stylized, James Bond or Fast and Furious Hyper-Realism, or maybe Michael Mann/Billy Friedkin vérité. Each of these styles follow rules and conceits (or not) that affect what will or should be cut or sweetened. Best to understand that beforehand as this will inform the how new recordings will be done and what materials will be used from library to create the palette one will edit from. Once these rules (or ones you create for your project) are decided on, the cutting will often go easier.
Creating a palettes: a fixed set of sounds that adhere to an aesthetic to utilize for ones edit, before attempting the edit. Enforcing an aesthetic defined by the selection of ones palette leads to greater consistency and verisimilitude that would not be had otherwise. Before doing the actual editing, think in terms of creating a wide and varied palette of sonic textures that includes: engines, tire whines, skids, wind, whooshes, object blur-bys, Doppler shifts with engines or not, engine/wheel/compartment vibrations and rattles, manifold roars, and muffler growls.
Exciting and kinetic car chases (and they aren’t all exciting or kinetic) are about one thing: variation, an attribute achieved mostly through rev’s and acceleration. Stasis is death. Holding on a high revving engine, even at an absurd RPM can still be boring. Yet all the variety doesn’t have to come from the engine.
Use perspective cleverly. Be constantly shifting the sonic and viewers perspective for variety. Do not feel beholden to use on-board recordings for interior shots and vice-versa. In fact, well recorded on-board recordings that use microphones outside the vehicle can make fantastic POV shots of cars maneuvering and doing things a traditional on-board or exterior on perspective recording can’t.
Don’t be beholden to picture edits. Pass-bys can always overlap and pre-lap interiors and constants. Interior accelerations are great to pre-lap over an exterior shots before cutting in.
As with anything that is designed, attack the sequence numerous times, constantly making adjustments.
My approach is to cut horizontal layers from beginning to end, one layer at a time. Attack the hero-car engine layer first. Cut it without regard to anything else so you get familiar with your palette for just that element. Then do the antagonists engines only and finish that pass. Then move on to skids…finish the pass. Then Tires. Then whooshes. Repeat.
Refining car chases is a lot like wood finishing. Start with a 200 grit and keep refining with finer and finer sandpaper till you’re down to wet/dry and everything shines. Use pitch-shifting to dynamically vary interior steadies, enhance accelerations and intensify them and hype-up the doppler shift on pass-bys.
Each chase is like a mini-drama. Use non-sound specific techniques including edit frequency, kinesthesis, layering and plugin texturing to create a beginning middle and end, always building toward a climax:
Small to large,
Few to many,
Quiet to loud,
Simple to complex.
When you sit down to cut edit fast to create an initial shape. Refine slowly to create detail. It’s so much easier and efficient to give up on an early crude approach that doesn’t work if a lot of time hasn’t been invested in the polishing.
If you are working with multi-channel vehicle recordings (multiple mics in the engine, cabin and exhaust), edit multi-channel recordings in multi-channel tracks (don’t fillet out to mono) and cut for action and movement first, ignoring for the time being how bad the mix sounds. That will be another pass. Get the first pass done and analyze... then refine.
Unless the camera actually goes under the hood to show a supercharger or turbo charger, avoid engine compartment microphones in multi-channel vehicle recordings. The whining and whirring is annoying and sounds very unnatural. We don’t often hear the sounds from the engine compartment.
Create sonic focus. Just because there’s two cars neck and neck in a chase doesn’t mean you must hear both of them simultaneously. If the camera is in the hero car, don’t cut the other car unless it does something you MUST hear. If you cut sound for both cars without a sonic reason to, they will wash out each other’s specificity.
If you are intercutting between two cars onboard at high speed, use tire whine and wind buffeting to accent and change cuts and perspectives. A cracked window whistle is a nice accent to help differentiate interior steadies and adds some intensity. And as the speeds increase or the action intensifies, use interior or onboard rattles or vibrations to mirror and build.
Be sensitive to each vehicles unique mechanical attributes. Don’t use a diesel engine for a non-diesel or vice-versa. Try to get the cylinder count correct if you don’t have a match for the vehicle. Generally, it’s pretty easy to hear the differences between cylinder count: 4 cylinder gas engines don’t sound much like a V-6 or V-8 etc. though, honestly, I can’t tell the difference between an inline 6 and a V-6. Turbo-charged engines don’t sound like normally aspirated engines.
Be sensitive to each vehicles exhaust note. Most high end sports cars are designed to have a very specific sound. Porsche, among others, has patented and copyrighted it’s exhaust note. It sounds like no other. Jaguar’s modern F-types have a user controllable system that modifies its exhaust sound and how it is ported from the manifold.
Skids, swerves and peel-outs separate the good from the great. These are the delicate grace notes to a car chase that can create believable character or relegate ones work to Dukes of Hazard purgatory.
Rule #1: Never use pavement skids when the vehicles are on dirt.
Rule #2: Drive-aways don’t always need peel-outs.
Ru;e #3: Swerves don’t always need swerve skids.
Rule #4: Skids/swerves are rich in piercing mid/high frequency content. Vary them with the more mid-range groaning sounds. Artificially interrupting steady skids with blank space adds character.
Never confuse an automatic shift for a manual!
Sometimes you need a little something...extra to put you over. On Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the sequence where Indy drives the truck loaded with the Ark, we added lion and tiger growls to the truck engine revs only when Indy was at the wheel to create a more “heroic” sound when he drives it. Human and animals screams are tremendous sweeteners for skids and, layered properly with traditional ones, create a wonderful new color.
Remember too that, except for the exhaust note, most cars sound pretty much the same. So interior cabin, tire whines, wind over windshield etc. all can be swapped in from other vehicle recordings to get you the colors you need when the main set of matched recordings don’t capture it. Do not feel obliged or locked into the sounds you have or don’t have for a specific vehicle. They don’t all have to match. As long as you have the basics of the engine in one kit:
Starts and idles
Revs standing and in motion
Drive aways at various speeds
In, stops and turn offs at various speeds
Onboard constants at various speeds with accelerations and decelerations
Pass-bys at various speeds
...you’re probably good to go.
