A tip to improve your fight scenes

You can’t make an action movie without a few fight scenes. However, fight scenes come in all flavors…there’s the stylish martial arts type, the american bar fight style, weapons fights, and the two people who don’t know how to fight beating the crap out of each other style. But regardless of the style, there is one often overlooked technique that can turn a snooze fest into an edge of your seat thriller: Sound Design…

Sound design is basically building the sound of a scene largely, or sometimes entirely, from scratch during post production. A fight scene is typically shot without capturing any field audio…so the sound must be built entirely in editing. Many independent filmmakers put little effort into sound design, and that is a huge mistake. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but I really believe the old saying, “Sound is 80% of what you see”.

To prove the point, how many times have you seen a scene where two people are fighting and one has a baseball bat or other similar weapon. The other person falls behind some object, and the person with the bat pummels them. You aren’t actually seeing anyone get hit (and probably a slyly placed cut means that no one is even near where the actor is hitting). But even without seeing it you instantly get an impression of the beating…is it vividly painful…or is it commical? This impression is based entirely on the choices made in sound design.

So lets cover some essential sounds and their impact on a fight scene. Remember some of these sounds may only be barely audible, but still have a huge impact.

• Hits Obviously you must make careful consideration of what sort of sound to use for any actual body to body impact. A broad mixture of high and low frequencies is usually best. The low frequency is the power, the high frequency is the sting. For this reason its good to layer several different sounds to produce one powerful hit. Try to mix deep sounds like the sound of punching a table or wall, with higher pitch “whip-like” sounds when doing foley for this type of sound.
• Foot Steps In real fights on footwork is a major part of determining who comes out the victor. By the same token, the sound of feet moving adds depth and realism to the fight. Pay special attention to the surface and environment. Should the steps echo because they are in an large empty room with solid floors? Or maybe the surface isn’t so solid. I remember seeing an excellent sound design test online where a fight scene took place in the snow. The footsteps in snow sounds were made using a light sand bag. For comedy: Minimize the presence of footsteps.
• Breathing The exhausted pants of two actors gripped in battle adds a sense of urgency to any battle scene.
• Grunts By the same token, grunts and screams add alot of emotional impact to the fight. Grunting doesn’t have to be perfectly in sync with the actors face because grunting is guttural. Big grunts should occur before punches, or when one fighter over powers another while wrestling. Smaller grunts should occur when both are struggling but neither is over powering the other.
• Clothes Rustling Barely audible, but adds a great deal of realism. Clothes rustling is especially important for martial arts to help give the impression of unbelievable speed to punches and kicks.
• Enviroment Sounds Depending on the setting, very distant sounds of the environment are an important addition to the overall sound design. These could be birds, trains, or a refrigerator humming. These don’t add any particular emotional impact to the fight scene, but they help to make the sound design feel less like a sound design. In other words, adding these environmental sounds makes it seem like the audio is the real audio of the scene.
• Casual Impacts You absolutely have to add the sounds of minor impacts as well. This is particularly true of weapons. For example, the sound of a bat hitting the floor when its knocked out of the actors hand….even if you don’t cut to a shot of the bat hitting the floor and the bats landing is completely offscreen, there should still be a sound at the approximate moment of impact. Other types of casual impacts are if the actor his a wall, or when the actor hits the ground. Remember that each limb hitting the ground should have its own impact sound.
• WrestlingIf the fight scene involves the actors wrestling on the ground, then sounds should be added of skin to skin, and clothes to clothes rubbing. If at any point one actor gets the other in some sort of submission hold the sounds need to be exaggerated greatly. Rubbing a balloon is a good foley for this type of sound

The next time you’re editing together a fight scene, be sure to experiment with these subtle sounds to enhance the mood and impact of the scene.