Antique & Classic Cars Blog
Hey Hollywood (& New York), We Know Car Sounds
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008How many decades has it been that you turn on a TV show or watch a movie with a car in it and they’ve got a stickshift foley track (sound added after shooting) paired with an automatic transmission car?
Does anybody who pays even a little bit of attention to the way cars sound not know the distinctive break and drop in engine note that comes from clutching and shifting versus the UHHHH-uhhhhh slipdown of an autobox shifting on its own?
Guess the field of producers and editors doesn’t attract a lot of car guys and gals. Or the foley effects the studios have been reaching for are 30-40 years old (since few people driving the cop cars, taxis & family sedans we hear these sounds in is driving a stick).
Case in point, Supernatural, a cool show with a bitchin’ black ‘67 Impala 4-door. Kudos to them for choosing it and great engine sound. But it’s singing through a stickshift. And Dean and Sam are driving a column shift autobox Chevy. Not saying it’s a bad show. Far from it. Ain’t no stickshift car, though….
3 Responses to "Hey Hollywood (& New York), We Know Car Sounds"
I think they do this quite a bit for a lot of films and shows.
For instance, on aircraft shows, they’ll talk about Vietnam era aircraft, yet show Korean war era photos and films. Since I’m also an aircraft nut, it jumps out at me, but I’m guessing the average Joe Schmoe doesn’t have a clue.
We notice it a LOT in the movies and shows that we watch. A couple of extra points, ever watch a cop reality show and hear the squeeling tires and engine noise. It’s horribly added for effect and done poorly. Another thing is tire squeels when it shouldn’t happen.
We also like seeing the tire marks from the prior “retakes” on a particular scene. It makes us laugh.
I noticed this in Blood Simple, the Coen Brothers’ breakthrough film. There’s a scene with a car driven into a remote field to hide a body and in one of the shots, it’s clear they’ve driven back and forth to the “remote” spot several times from the near parallel tracks in the dirt.
And definitely the burnout stuff appears repeatedly. (I’ve seen that in Supernatural too.) Boy, you’d think the director or second unit director (the one often shooting the stunts) would say to the stunt drivers and cameramen, “let’s do the first take as carefully as we can in hopes we can use it with only the one set of tracks.”
They also almost always reach for a V8 engine note-sometimes with cars that are 4- and 6-cylinder models.
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MotorMouth Kris Palmer, freelance auto writer and editor, blogs about vintage cars, the collectible auto scene and just about anything else that goes vroom.
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