If you’ve ever watched The Walking Dead, you know the show is rather gory – and audio plays a big role in that. On this project, I did a lot of foley recording to capture the same gory sounds for our game.
The first thing to do was figure out what objects would provide nice gore elements when recorded. Since we’re talking about bone crunching, eviscerating zombies and hearing guts, it was kind of a no-brainer: get lots of food items that were both juicy and/or crunchy in some way. Honeydews, watermelons, coconuts, cabbage, cantaloupes, packages of ramen and so on. Weapon wise, it was a matter of looking at the melee items the player would have and then finding suitable equivalents: machetes, baseballs bats, knives, etc. Of course, in foley what winds up sounding like the object on-screen is often nothing at all like the object itself. Case in point: many of the ax sounds borrow heavily from a five pound wood wedge I bought at the hardware store and slammed against different surfaces.
From there, it was a matter of recording all the different combinations of items impacting foods. Baseball bat on cantaloupe, baseball bat on honeydew, machete into watermelon, hammer on coconut, etc. The first thing I actually tried was sledgehammer on watermelon. Looking back, I’m not sure why I expected anything other than the obvious: a horrible mess of watermelon covering the foley room, the audio equipment and myself. Attempting to learn from my mistake, I decided to scale it back and just use a baseball bat the next day on only half a piece of watermelon:
Clearly, that still wasn’t the result I was looking for. But it’s all about trial and error and finding happy accidents.
What did work well was a more subtle approach. Lightly tapping pieces of fruit instead of whaling on them, dampening the impacts by putting pieces of debris over the area I was striking, slowly crushing or pulling the food apart – all of these worked really well. Cabbage in particular was invaluable for bone breaking and general crunch sounds and wrapping up the foley session by dropping the accumulated mess in front of the mic made great layers for entrail and blood splattering sounds.
We used a few different mics – a Sony PCM-d50 digital recorder mounted on a tripod, an AKG vocal mic for little details and a Sennheiser shotgun mic to see what would happen. We mostly used the material captured by the PCM but the AKG was nice for tiny droplets and splatters that got used as details. In all, there were about 2 – 3 hours of recorded material and our foley room looked like this:
This is a 38 second montage of the unedited, raw sounds:
I edited and mixed this material along with some other foley I had from a previous project and made a grab-bag of sounds. Some of it was attached to blood particle effects, some was attached to body parts, a lot of it was used in melee combat. All of it was implemented using Wwise. Below is a one minute video showing game footage with all of the other audio disabled except for the the foley material and melee weapon sounds I got in another session (sledgehammer and ax impacts, weapon swings, knife whooshes, etc):
