I am working on a student short and I am need of good sounding 'punch' sounds for my film.

January 15, 2006 8:56 AM

I am working on a student short and I am need of good sounding 'punch' sounds for my film. Are there any good leads on the web where I could find some that don't sound cartoonish? Thank you.
posted by cheero to media & arts (13 comments total)

buy some meat, and record the sound of you punching it. trust me.
posted by lemonfridge at 9:00 AM on January 15, 2006

or just punching the palm of your hand if you cant afford a hunk of meat (i realise your a student :) )
posted by lemonfridge at 9:01 AM on January 15, 2006

Anything you find on the web will be copyrighted. Here are some ideas.
posted by caddis at 9:15 AM on January 15, 2006

Have you tried findsounds? You'll have to check for yourself if the results are copyrighted or not.
posted by hooray at 9:38 AM on January 15, 2006

What lemonfridge refers to is the fine art of foley sound.
posted by chrominance at 10:25 AM on January 15, 2006

There is also a fairly new site called The Freesound Project. It's a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.
posted by monsta coty scott at 10:41 AM on January 15, 2006

I think foley artists normally punch a chicken near a mic. Slap said chicken to foley the sound of comedic fapping.
posted by sourwookie at 10:51 AM on January 15, 2006

I heard they beat up stalks of celery. The water inside makes a nice 'spprrrsh' sound.
posted by PercussivePaul at 11:32 AM on January 15, 2006

From my limited experience in the matter, I can recommend hitting a variety of things with a variety of things and record the lot. Crunchy/crispy vegetables are useful (try ripping a cabbage), as is hitting sofas and fruit with hard objects. Pay attention to different types of impact, 'thwacks', 'thumps', 'smacks' and so on. Then play around with what you have in SoundForge (or similar) and particularly over-lay different sounds to achieve the type of punch you require. Clint Bajakian in caddis' link gives a fair introduction to this process.
posted by MetaMonkey at 11:32 AM on January 15, 2006

According to Andy Moorer who was a sound engineer for Lucasfilm, the standard composite of sounds for a punch in the nose was:
1. air whoosing past a microphone (for the fist traveling through the air)
2. a small caliber pistol for the inital slap of impact
3. the impact of a melon dropped out of a 2nd storey window for the crunch.

He claimed that one of the major reasons that the fruit-growing region of California didn't totally go under during the depression was fight scenes in Westerns because of all the melons they were buying to drop out of windows. I don't fully believe him.

Oh, he also said that the standard sound of someone hitting the ground is a box of boxing gloves dropped.
posted by plinth at 11:34 AM on January 15, 2006

there are plenty of open-source sounds at flashkit.
posted by muddylemon at 2:49 PM on January 15, 2006

Oh, it so depends on what your'e doing. Is it martial arts related? Or bar room brawl?

For martial arts, and maybe other stuff, I love the sound of a ruler being flatly smacked against a flat surface. It takes a couple of strikes for practice but when done properly the whoosh, thud and crack are very distinct.
posted by snsranch at 5:46 PM on January 15, 2006

Mystery Science Theater 3000 taught me that slabs of meat attached to wooden paddles can be slapped together to make punching and kicking sounds. Twisting and ripping a stalk of celery is for breaking bones.
posted by patgas at 6:24 AM on January 16, 2006