Where to Get Awesome Sound Effects for Your Film Project and Why You Need Them

Anyone with even a passing interest in movies will know just how crucial it is that the soundtrack and sound effects for the overall quality of a production. It would be almost pointless to shoot an awesome film with great visuals only to then ruin the entire project with sub-standard or poorly thought-out musical choices.

One area of sound in your project will relate to songs or a musical score that will play through and over your film and another will cover the sound elements within the film itself, namely the sound effects of the production itself.

Sound effects (SFX) are a great tool for a director to use in order to either inject realism to a piece or perhaps to create a fantastical world. It’s very much the paint on the canvas that is your film’s overall score.

Great Ways to Use Sound Effects

Using sound effects is very much an art form that takes a great deal of experience to perfect and there are many ways that the usage of these can greatly aid the overall narrative and ethos of your film or video project. Here are a few.

Ramp Up the Tension

Some SFX are used to create the illusion of an action and others are merely there for show. Some can do both. Think for instance of a creaking door in a horror film, which can be very ‘real’ but also accentuated for ambient effect. Or perhaps a car chase where your use of sound effects is of course used to replicate the sounds of a speedy pursuit but can be ramped up to make it far louder and more aggressive than it actually needs to be.

Creating an Otherworldly Ambience

If you are putting together a project that is quite literally out of this world, like in a sci-fi or fantasy feature, then you might use sound effects to project that to your audience. That can be creating a score that is quirky and expansive but could also employ the use of space-age SFX to create the feeling of being somewhere unlike our common reality.

Fixing Issues from the Shoot

Sometimes we use SFX to fix errors from the shoot. Maybe the sound guy didn’t pick up what he should have done, then you’ll need to use a bank of samples and sounds to match those you had hoped to get on location. This is very much the bread and butter of SFX but no less important than more creative uses mentioned earlier.

Atmospheric Sound Effects

There are occasions when SFX is used to cover aspects that may not be visually captured, or without the relevant sound. These can come in the form of atmospheric samples like wind, thunder or rain. They can also be used to recreate a bustling street scene or water flowing in a stream. These can either be for show to replicate what couldn’t be collected on a shoot.

Where Can You Get Great Sound Effects?

When it comes to getting any form of music or sound effects for your film or video project you will start to get used to the concept of licensing and copyright. Clearly you cannot use anything you didn’t produce yourself without the relevant permission and getting that permission can be a real nightmare.

For the use of mainstream music, it’s not only a logistical nightmare it’s also a very expensive undertaking. In terms of the use of sound affects you can of course try to go out and record some of your own, but without the relevant equipment or knowledge, you are soon going to find that this won’t work.

Luckily, there is an answer and that comes in the form of royalty-free music.

What is Royalty-Free Music?

Royalty-free music, just like royalty-free stock footage, is a resource that has become a must-have for anybody producing visual content. It gives you a massive amount of quality material for a fixed one-off subscription cost and means that you are entirely covered in terms of the licensing and use of the music you download.

The best royalty-free music providers also offer massive SFX libraries that are perfect for any filmmaker and are both inexpensive and fit for purpose. That’s because they are built with you in mind by professional filmmakers and sound recordists whose work is then available for you to use as you wish.

The databases and libraries offered are well ordered and segmented according to tags that are split by many different relevant categories. These can be down to genre or style and make the whole process of finding the ideal SFX samples, in among thousands on offer, very easy indeed.

Basically, if you are producing film and video projects then this kind of resource is beyond ideal and something you can’t really do without. The fact that the resource is available for, in most cases, a very reasonable fee makes the usage of them something of a no-brainer.