The 2011 academic production of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy brought with it great opportunities for original sound effects. Chelsea Leighton, Alison Pittsley, Chris Trevino and I recorded all manner of strange and interesting sounds: giant birds, laser gun zaps, miscellaneous destruction, and various percussive sounds for Improbability Drive.
For me, the most thrilling experience of this was recording the laser gun zaps. Inspired by the methods used in Pixar's Wall-E, we struck the top of a long, hanging spring, and recorded it from the bottom. Since the high frequencies traveled through the spring faster, they arrived at the bottom first, and this is what we got:
The above three sounds were my final cues, used in the show. Reverb is the only modification we added to our recordings.
This first picture (Chelsea Leighton and Chris Trevino) gives a good idea of what we were doing. However, we deemed this room too noisy, and moved to the theatre where I hung the spring from a high catwalk. With the lights off to avoid hum, we were able to get very clean recordings.
