The Wilhelm Scream

Like many of us in this class I am a huge movie buff. I enjoy watching movies almost to a fault, and one thing that I am very good at is remembering lines and scenes. Mainly because I watch films again and again. This is why I wanted to clue some of you in on arguably the most famous sound effect in movie history. The Wilhelm Scream. This sound effect is a stock sound effect that has been used in over 200 films, usually to represent someone dying. Whether you've noticed it before or not, you have undoubtably heard it if you have seen films like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Saving Private Ryan, and even animated films like Toy Story and Hercules.

The sound effect is credited as first being used in the 1953 films The Charge at Feather River, it gets it's name from the character, Wilhelm, who gets shot by an arrow. Since then it has become sort of a running gag among some movie directors. Most notably George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino, and Peter Jackson, who pretty much use it in every film.

The thing that I find so funny about it is that the director's are making a conscious choice to include this sound effect in their film. I originally thought it might just be a coincidence, but the sound effect is used in too many movies for nobody to know. Christ it has it's own Wikipedia post  for it.

However if you still don't believe me, here are two videos dedicated solely to the use of the Wilhelm scream.

... And the other one.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Voice Changing

I never knew there was a pitch-changing tool in Final Cut before, so now I'm having fun trying to figure out what all the various attributes do. Does anyone know how to make a voice more feminine (there is a female character in my edit, but I don't have a female voice actor)? Just changing the pitch doesn't really do the trick, it just gives it a chipmunk-like sound. Also, what are all these variables? Smooth, analysis window, overlap, reset scale...What is all this?

More HDR

Thanks to Travis for the link. This is an HDR photo by dacoach89_89 which I find pretty cool. I like the entropy that wrestles everything to dust again!

So, if I wanted to insert a 3D object or character into this background I could use the picture itself as an illuminating source, so that the 3d character would perfectly fit in that environment as if it had been actually there.

I quote from the Maya documentation: With image-based lighting, you use an environment texture (an image file) to illuminate the scene. Typically, the image is a photograph of a real environment, either a panoramic image or a photograph produced by taking pictures of a chrome ball (to capture the surrounding environment).

This is a technology developed by Paul Devebec, a USC researcher who is best known for his work in high dynamic range imaging and image-based modelling and rendering. He was awarded (along with Tim Hawkins, John Monos and Mark Sagar) a 2009 Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the design and engineering of the Light Stage capture device .

You have seen or can see his work in some of these films: The Matrix (1999), Spider-Man 2 (2004), King Kong (2005), Superman Returns (2006), Spider-Man 3 (2007), and Avatar (2009).

Image from HDR Shop, an HDR image processing and manipulation tool that you can download HERE , unfortunately Windows only:-(

Quick&Dirty

So this is a really quick and dirty compositing. Shot with an iPhone in class against a small blue board, composited, tracked and keyed in After Effects. Total time about 15 min. I added some subtle "light movement" to the still background which we downloaded from the internet.

And, oh, yes I added a street ambient downloaded from freesound.org

A simple example of what effects are all about and how they liberate you from impossible locations etc.

Here are the elements of the composite:

My SFX Work

These are some sample scenes of film, special effects, miniature work and computer animation work I have done in the past few years.