Known for his sonic experimentation and worldizing techniques, Richard King is a master of finding creative ways to manipulate sounds and make movies feel larger than life. In this video, the sound artist behind the King Collection and blockbuster films like Interstellar and Dunkirk reveals how he used mechanical vibrations to create the sounds of spaceships fighting against gravity, World War II Spitfires rattling with speed and turbulence, earthquakes shaking entire houses, and even frogs falling from the sky.
00:00 - Using vibration sounds in Interstellar
Listening back to some of his vibration sound effects featured in King Collection: Vol. 1, Richard King describes making hundreds of recordings by placing vibrating objects on surfaces like metal and wood to produce different intensities of vibrations and recording the results with a combination of contact mics and room mics.
“These kinds of sounds are very good for vibrating machinery or being inside an airplane or spaceship or something that's vibrating very quickly,” says King. “It conveys speed; it conveys danger if it's amped up a lot. We recorded a lot of these for Interstellar to convey the idea of the ship shaking, vibrating; different intensities, different levels of gravity.”
1:19 - Dunkirk planes
“For Dunkirk, we did a lot of vibration using an actual plane cockpit mockup,” says King. For that film, he recalls attaching a ButtKicker haptic device and a paint shaker to a mockup of a Spitfire cockpit used for filming. “The ButtKicker is very good because you can use a rheostat on it and make it more intense or less intense or slower or faster, so we could actually do ramp-ins and ramp-downs,” he explains.
In post, “We used every metallic object you could find and put different vibrator devices on them,” King says. “Anything that moved ever so slightly would be accentuated in a larger object, so it would sound a lot more massive and intense.
02:24 - Sound’s effect on the environment
In an Ask Me Anything session, King posted, “Part of the sense of immensity and scale is the way a sound is affected by and affects the environment around it.” Reflecting on that statement, King reiterates that vibration is the most tangible way of expressing the power, vibration, and strength of certain sounds. “There's a big loud boom if a meteor shockwave hit the earth,” he adds. “Things are going to shake and that's going to convey immensity, scale, and weight and size.”
Revisiting the Dunkirk example, King notes that the cockpit-shaking technique was initially done as a visual effect, and that matching the vibrations with sound effects was key to achieving a visceral feeling. “We did a lot of work and tried to really key in on that kind of vibration and find different intensities of vibration as the plane accelerated or decelerated or banked or dove or climbed,” he says. “We could weave that in and make it more intense or less intense to try to make the audience feel the G-forces as the plane accelerated.”
04:34 - Subwoofer earthquakes and falling frogs
King has also used a “giant, piston-driven subwoofer” to vibrate entire rooms, houses, and even a boat. “We put it in a house and cranked the oscillator down below 20 hertz so you couldn't hear anything, but everything in the house was activated,” he recalls. “You could ramp in and out of that and come right up to the point where the sound became audible, and then crank it down again and it would vary the intensity and the vibrations. We even put it on a boat and did that and made the wooden boat shake.”
“It is very hard to create those kinds of situations out of independent little effects,” King continues. “This was kind of a global thing; we could put it in different rooms” (such as a kitchen with lots of rattling glassware or a music studio with instruments lying around). King has even used the subwoofer earthquake technique in some unexpected ways, such as a scene in Magnolia where thousands of frogs fall from the sky.
05:48 - A must-have tool in your library
“I think it's very useful to have these kinds of sounds in your library,” says King. “You can amp up or highlight the sound that's affecting the environment you're in. You can accentuate acceleration, speed, intensity. You can actually make the sound that is causing the vibration feel louder because it's clearly affecting everything else that you're hearing in the scene.” This makes the effect more tangible to the audience, King says, because it invokes the same visceral, bodily sensations they’d experience if the sound were actually happening in the room.
Want to hear more of Richard King’s sounds and use them in your own productions? Check out King Collection Vol. 4, a brand new general library full of unique material to inspire your sound design. Dig into even more unconventional methods with Extended Techniques in Sound, or watch Finding Inspiration for Sound Design with Richard King to learn more from a master of creative sound.