Clutter and a cow shed
A day in the life of a German sound effects man
Joo Fuerst's studio might look like chaos to some; shoes, bottles, suitcases, tapes and metal poles all lie on the floor, around the area where the 54-year-old sits in front of his microphone and monitors.
The rest of the room is also filled with countless objects collected by Fuerst in the course of his work over the past few years.
Musical instruments and tools, for example, and a punching bag and a garden gnome.
“I always need the things again. And I’m always getting new stuff,” he says with a satisfied glance around the studio.
The sound-effects maker uses the objects to make clapping, rustling, creaking and squeaking noises for films.
“Thanks to the Internet, it’s not necessary to live in a big city anymore. We love living in the country,” says the father-of-four, who set up the studio in a 300-year-old old cow shed in southern Germany five years ago.
“The shed is ideal for my work. The noises sound good. Apart from that it means I’ve got my peace and quiet and can run riot as much as I like,” says Fuerst as he gets ready to make his next recording.
First he lays a little sack full of gravel on the floor, pulls on a pair of worn-out, non-matching shoes, directs the microphone at his feet and puts on his headphones.
It’s deadly quiet in the studio as Fuerst looks intently at a screen on the wall, which shows a scene from a film in which a woman walks along a gravel path with her dog.
Synchonising his steps with hers, Fuerst tramps up and down on the bag of gravel, lightly at first and then gradually louder as the woman comes closer to the camera.
When the woman stands still Fuerst rewinds to the beginning of the scene.
“Now it’s the dog’s turn,” he says and begins once again to tread on the gravel bag, though with quicker and lighter steps this time.
The rustling from the bush in which the dog is sniffing around he adds later, by scrunching up a ball of old recording tape.
He even imitates the dog’s panting. “Until I can find a dog that can pant at the right pace, I’d rather do it myself,” he jokes.
At the end, all of the sounds are edited to get the right volume and then brought together onto the same track.
“It’s important that it all sounds natural,” he says. “The noises are supposed to add to the film, not distract from it.”
Apart from the voices of the actors, almost all sounds in films are added later in the studio – when a car door shuts for example, a floorboard creaks or a glass breaks.
That’s because the original sounds are often too unclear because of other background noises, Fuerst explains.
Sometimes sounds are also added to create atmosphere or direct the audience’s attention.
Fuerst has worked on more than 300 films as well as countless television productions.
There’s no set training for this kind of job.
“I’m actually a musician,” says Fuerst. He began his career as a film musician and sound technician at a film studio in Munich, where he was allowed to observe the work of a renowned sound-effects maker, Hans-Walter Kramski.
“That was a formative experience,” he says. “I was totally fascinated by his work, which was really creative and didn’t want to do anything else. Until then I hadn’t even known that such a profession existed.”
In fact, sound effects makers have been around as long as motion pictures have. Even in the digital age, no large-scale production is made without a person who, for example, later adds the sound of the actors’ steps.
“Sound-effects makers will never be replaced, at least not in top-quality television programmes and films,” says Philip Hahn, a postproduction manager for Bavaria Film Studios.
Fuerst has been in the industry for 30 years, working with his “heart and soul,” as he puts it.
He’s constantly experimenting, he says, and always discovering new noises or ways of recreating them.
“It’s the most fun when you make a noise with something that doesn’t look appropriate. It means there’s no bounds to your creativity, as long as it sounds right.”
He also loves the challenge of creating noises which don’t exist in reality, for fantasy and horror films, for example.
“People have sound cliches and we all know how things are supposed to sound. A zombie has to be a bit slobbery, a vampire a bit leathery. And when horses gallop we can all hear the infamous coconuts.”
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