You know the one I mean. At a dramatic moment taking place in a wide-open landscape, or one involving America or patriotism, the cheesiest movies will use that screeching, echoing eagle sound. It’s one of the most hackneyed, cliched sound effects in Hollywood.
What I want to know is, is it always the same stock eagle sound, maybe owned by one company, that all the movies pay to use? Or have multiple eagles been recorded? If it is the former, it’s amazing to think that one eagle is responsible for them all.
Does anyone know anything about this? Does anyone find the “eagle sound” as hilarious as I do?
There are a bunch of stock sounds out there, apparently. I had a disc with thousands of them years ago. I noticed that the donkey sound on the disc was the exact same .wav Bethesda used for the orc attack noise in The Elder Scrolls: Arena. Movies will often use these, even high budget movies. You can hear the same stock sounds used for doors opening, children playing in the background, and animals calling.
One sound effect I’ve always wondered about was that ‘wolf howl’ effect heard in low-budget '60s horror movies-- the one that sounds nothing at all like a wolf howling, but instead is kind of a hiccuping, multi-toned ‘luke-lurrOOOooo…’ sound. What* is * that thing?!
For some reason I associate it with British vampire films-- Hammer, maybe?-- although for the life of me I can’t think of a specific example at the moment.
There are vast sound effects libraries that Foley studios use to add sound to scenes.
Sound studios actually add, post-production, most of the sound you hear during a dialog scene, as well as others. If you’ve ever heard nothing but the raw feed from an on-set mic, it picks up the voices of the actors and not much else. Even those can sound a little off until you mix them with room tone.
Footsteps and things are done by live people, because it would be a miracle if a pre-recorded bit of walking matched the visible motions of the actors, and using the same exact sound clip of a foot stepping through, say, gravel, would very shortly sound as ridiculous as those martial arts films where every single combat impact sounds identical (rumored to be created by whacking a bag of rice with a bamboo stick).
Otherwise, unless a sound is extremely unusual (there’s a film clip from the 1970s of George Lucas’ sound guy recording himself hitting a taut guywire of a tower with a hammer to get the blaster sound effects for Star Wars), it’s probably in a stock library somewhere, and it would take an extremely nitpicky and well-funded production to pay for a sound guy to camp out in hawk-frequented areas waiting for the perfect call, rather than use what’s in the library.
OK, yeah, it would take too much time, money, and effort to get a brand-new eagle or hawk call…but why do they all have to use the same hawk sound? There must be others in the standard library. Do they all just use the first one in the list because hey, it’s the first? No need to scroll down further?
I think my most hated standard sound effects are the generic “children laughing and playing,” and “cop radio noise.” Everyone knows the first one, mostly from 99% of commercials that have kids in them, and the second is in a lot of cop shows and movies, and was in the original Sim City (or was it 2000?) when you played a police station.
LMNO Productions uses a cat screech noise in practically every episode of each TV show they produce- I’m prone to calling them “Yowlin’ Cat Productions.”
I frequently see bald eagles kayaking on Lake Monroe. (I’m the one kayaking, not the eagles.) Their call is surprisingly weak, almost like a regular old bird tweet.
Well, if you ever hear hawks with that sort of cry, they don’t vary a whole hell of a lot. Occasionally, storms or fires in the mountains will bring some hawks down our way for a week or so, and when they cry, they sound just like the movies, and each cry sounds not a lot different from the last one.
So I would bet the libraries aren’t chock full of distinct samples, given that not only do you have to get the sound, you have to get it from a long distance away in order to sound right, which means you have to wait to get it without any other background (or in this case, foreground) noise mixed in with it.
So if you don’t like the overused sound from the library, you pay to send a guy into some quiet, hawk-festooned mountains for a few days in order to get some clean tracks that sound more or less identical to what’s in the library already.
Sound Designer chimeing in. You are right, there are sound effects libraries that can be purchased. Two of the major ones are the BBC sound librare and the Sound Ideas series of libraries (Including a series of Lucas Arts sounds.). These are multiple disc libraries. BBC was 40 discs at one time and the Sound Ideas 1000 series was 28 discs. (Their other series ranged from 10-30 discs.) When purchased these libraries confered reproduction rights for performance, film, theatre, etc. About the only thing you couldn’t do is sell the effect by itself. This enables the designer to use these sounds for his productions without having to worry about royalties and procuring rights. Of course the libraries are expensive, on the order of $50 to $100 a disc.
And the hawk sound is on one of them. So are many sounds I reconize over and over in various film and TV productions. There is a perticular thunder clap from BBC that is one of the best there is and is used so many times that I can’t count the number. (There is also a continous thunder segment that has a distant car horn in it that will show up in period produtions that take place before the automobile was invented. It is almost unnoticable, you really have to reconize the track before it gets to that part to hear it. But everytime I do, I laugh about it.)
I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’ve noticed both of these specific sound effects, and my sister has even commented on these ones. The fake-sounding laughing children is used in a lot of cartoons and even plays once in Star Wars episode 1…the “cop radio noise” I didn’t notice until I played Simcity 3000, but now I hear it <i>every time</i> there’s a crime scene on TV. I hear stock sound effects everywhere now.