Here's how foley sounds are made for zombie classic 'Shaun of the Dead'

• We challenged Matt Davies to recreate sounds for a classic movie scene from his studio.
• Matt walks us through his trial-and-error process of creating sounds that compliment the action in the scene.
• We chatted with him about how he did it, the challenges he faced, and shared the final newly foleyed scene.

Matt Davies: Sometimes you have to make custom props for unique moments in films like this. [whooshing]

Joe Avella: First thing I'd like for you to do is introduce yourself and name maybe two or three projects that people would have heard your work in.

Matt: Hi, my name's Matt Davies. I'm a Foley artist and sound designer. I've worked on such films like the documentary "Rat Film" and the horror anthology "V/H/S/2." The clip I picked for this challenge was the "Shaun of the Dead" record-throwing scene. I picked this scene because it's one of my favorites in any film, just in terms of being a scene by itself, but also because the sound design and effects and Foley for it are just so well done that, coupled with the fact that it's one of my favorite scenes ever, I was just like, I have to do this scene. When I'm preparing to do a scene for Foley, this kind of automatic process starts where you start going through your library of props. And most Foley artists know their prop collection like the back of their hands because they've built up the collection for years. We don't have lists of all the stuff that we have in our libraries. It's all stored up here.

[silverware rustling] It's also that it's such a quick shot. It's one of these classic Edgar Wright kind of punch-ins and rip-opens that it just needs to communicate kind of this beat, you know, not this, like, nuance-y thing; it's just grabbing cutlery because there's a zombie in the backyard. It's an emergency. It just needs to be exciting. I think we technically have enough cutlery now, it's too much. But out of 20 different forks, there might be, like, two forks that are made out of the right kind of metal.

Joe: Why did you layer it in a couple of takes than just not try and get it all with one?

Matt: Because you're always kind of looking for the best way for the sound to translate in the mix of the film. So, in some cases, it makes a lot of sense to have the sound of the drawer opening by itself separate from the sound of the cutlery sliding, because you might have a note that's like, let's hear the aggression of the drawer being ripped open, and then let's diminish the sound of the cutlery because it's very sharp and bright. [clattering] [clattering]

Joe: One of the takes when you first started recording the laundry basket, what do you think you were adjusting for?

Matt: One thing that I figured out quite quickly was the initial sounds of kind of rattling and putting it down were quite fine. But then as you go in to rummage, you're realizing that certain sounds are much more dominant than others. So we're really just left with what I would consider the essence of the prop, which is hearing a little bit of the plastic to be reminded that this is a plastic laundry basket. Did they have to run upstairs or go in the laundry room to, like, gather that? There's more kind of comedy in there, being reminded of their, like, bachelor lifestyle. How do you really bring attention to things that matter from a, both a writing and directing standpoint that were part of the production design of that moment?

[plastic rattling] [whoosh] [plastic clunking] [plastic rattling] [whoosh] [plastic clunking]

This kind of acts as, like, a giant Wiffle ball, and the air kind of passing through as this is whooshing is gonna generate its own sound, so. [whoosh] Very big sound. Kind of long. It's maybe not very fast. It's boring. It's boring. It's not a good sound. So, the literal is often... can often not be the right way to do things, but we wanna have the same idea. We just don't wanna use the literal thing in this case. Worth a shot, always, but it doesn't always work out. So we need to find something else. What am I trying to accomplish? I'm trying to accomplish an object that has holes in the side, that needs to move quickly, and that needs to create this nice swishing sound. And automatically, just describing it to myself, I'm thinking, oh, a tennis racket. It is literally that. It is an object with a handle that's supposed to move through the air that also has a bunch of perforations created by all the cross strings. This rubber has kind of disintegrated, so I've got red on me.

[whooshing] OK, what am I actually wanting to do? I just wanted it to be funny because they're just hurling these plates at these zombies. So, we ended up going with, like, traditional wooden dowels because they just have a whoosh. Classic whoosh sound. Maybe a little bit more cartooniness. So we're gonna kind of, like, Donatello this. [whooshing]

We've got kind of the initial shot of him, seeing him lob it, and then kind of the POV almost of the record chasing towards the zombies. So, I think it'd be good if we had kind of had two different intensities of whoosh. There's kind of the wide and then the close. So, we got that. Too high. Maybe this one. Let's try that. I'm gonna do these character layers for him zipping away.

[dowel clatters] There you go.

[plates smashing] I did two or three that were very staccato and didn't have a lot of definition to them, which are just gonna kind of register as hits against the picture. So, and then that last one, though, I did kind of a longer [swishes] like that. And that kind of illustrates the sailing of kind of a large disc, kind of, like, Frisbee object. It's a little plasticky. I'm gonna try some different objects for the plates here. [bright swishing] Those are too fun. [deeper swishing] Too big. The thicker stick here is generating more low frequency, and the higher stick is generating more high frequency. [plates shattering] Smashing the plates and the mugs and everything for the plates and different ceramics kind of flying through the air. That stuff was fairly easy because, outside of having to watch the volume of those things a little bit, really all I'm doing is picking up and throwing, and then gravity and the randomness of the cosmos is affecting how they're going to blow apart.

[crashing and rattling]

Joe: So, I feel like you picked a plasticky, probably $10, $15 toaster. Were you kind of oscillating between a few, or you just knew, like, yep, it's this one?

Matt: Sometimes you need the literal things. So, I already have this toaster from this context, and it's a great-sounding toaster because the more I use it, the looser it gets, so it's very expressive. [rattling] The toaster that you see on screen is this, like, kind of white-beige-looking toaster that's cheap, it's been around the block, they've made toast maybe every day, so it's, like, it's a little loose.

[clattering] [clattering] It is hot in LA. So, this moment, there's this little wooden object, and it looks like it's just a static object without any machination in it, which isn't very interesting from a sound standpoint. It's such a hyperbolic scene that we're gonna exaggerate that moment with a little bit of rattle. So we've got this, I guess it's a back massager.

[wood rolling] [picking up record] [whooshing] [shattering] [picking up record] [whooshing] [shattering] This is the record that got thrown at the window, landed in the garden. So we're gonna pick that up. [picking up record] So, you don't need kind of the grabs quite as much, because [tapping] it's part of the kind of general sound of it lifting. That's the more important sound of it. This duster handle is nice because it has the same kind of, it's gonna give us the same, like, flat wind resistance, plus there's two, so it's gonna give us a little bit more dual tonality. This will give it that hyperbolic feel that makes the film exciting.

[whooshing] The thing for the records needs to be the coolest-sounding whoosh, but it also needs to be a highly performative whoosher because of the way that the records are featured. We have them going super-fast, kind of towards camera, and then there's a cut and then we see it hit, we see it fly off and seemingly kind of go into a neighbor's garden. I decided to try and zip-tie a bunch of zip ties to a stick to give it some more surface area, but also kind of a unique sound. Just a little bit more signature to the moment that's happening, as this is such an iconic moment in the film. We see them fly and then miss and then hit the wall. There are all these kind of cool character moments for the records. And so I wanted something that was more performative, so I could kind of give it more expressiveness. It's almost like a conductor, you know, get very kind of fanciful with it. [whooshing] [whooshing] [records smashing] [whooshing] [records smashing]

Joe: Part of the record-smashing, I noticed that you added plastic cassettes to when you were breaking the stuff. What weren't you getting from the original smashing where you felt a need to add another piece of plastic?

Matt: If you were to ask me what a record-breaking sounds like, I would say that it sounds like a ceramic vase, but I can't use that, especially in this scene, because we do actually have plates breaking. How can I do both plastic and ceramic? And so what you're looking for is a brittle plastic that has a good resonant tone to it. And cassette tapes, like VHS cassette plastic and audio cassette plastic especially, it's a really brittle, hollow, thin plastic. And so all of that air in it gives it the same kind of interpretation as a ceramic-breaking sound. [crashing] [crashing]

Joe: Can you give us an idea of, like, how you broke this, the most complicated of all the sound effects, down, and especially with the adjustments you even had to make, two pieces of wood, in order to get what you were looking for?

Matt: I broke it down, and I was like, OK, so these are kind of like wood boards and, you know, it's a shed, so it's not built like a tank, and he, you know, smashes his way through it. It's getting ripped apart pretty quickly, and then on top of that, it's then just falling to the ground and everything. So it quickly kind of turns into debris. I think I tried a very large wooden dowel that has a very true sustained tone, I piled a bunch of stuff on a table and kind of rocked that and threw a footstep board in underneath for resonance.

[clattering] It's essentially like that retro-engineering of building all the components, you know, it's like I'm gonna build this, this, and this, and then if they all sit together, they become the kind of sound for the door. [thudding] There's a lot involved in trying to make these kind of big horror-movie sounds interesting and dynamic when you're basically needing to recreate all of these big layers. You might need to just have a low-end layer to make things sound, like, weighty and interesting. Adding the jacket to the punching bag removed the kind of tacky sound of the outside of the punching bag. So that kind of neutralized the surface. But then I was kind of just left with this dull thud. They know that you have to kill zombies by attacking the head, so I needed something kind of hard like a skull. So I ended up putting some kind of pieces of wood there for the shovel to hit. The wood maybe resonates too much, so I have to kind of dull it and rejigger it. So it ends up being quite a complicated thing to actually do.

Job site accident. Bamboo is sharp. We usually wear gloves for sharp things. So, don't let anybody fool you. Foley is fun, but it can be dangerous. If you're working with sharp things, you do actually have to be careful. I've lit my hand on fire doing Foley before. I should've exercised caution and wore gloves. So, there you have it.