SD044 SCAFFOLDING

A few years ago, while working on the Cirque De Soilel 3D feature film, I needed some interesting scaffolding sounds and borrowed a few poles from my then neighbour, a circus training gym. While I only really recorded what we needed for the project the idea has stayed with me and after contacting half a dozen local scaffolding companies with no luck, my sister mentioned a company who had storage on the hill above her house. After making contact they were very helpful and late 2019 I did a series of recording sessions, way up on top of Brooklyn Hill in Wellington.

The HISSandaROAR Industrial Ambiences library contains great ensemble scaffolding sounds from a large scale building site at Victoria University, so I wasn’t aiming to do more of that. But I did want specific assemble and disassembly sounds, and the guys were great at building a small structure for me and manipulating individual components, as per the video documentation.

The second part of this library became possible after I mentioned my scaffolding recordings to a friend, who it turned out had just bought a photography studio backdrop with supporting metal frame. Unlike the heavy duty industrial scaffolding, this frame is more like a series of tent poles used when camping – by comparison light weight, but with interesting resonance. Apart from individual moves I had fun experimenting with multiple components, creating complex but lightweight sounds.

The resulting sound library will be an invaluable asset for practical sound effects editing, expanding your metal sound library with unique props, actions and weights, as well as more abstract uses… (I do also fully appreciate this is a time with disrupted work schedules & income, so I have tried to crunch pricing accordingly… Kia Kaha!)