BOOM LIBRARY SFX ADVENT CALENDAR
DAY 2
We sound designers love sound effects (Well, that might be obvious). We love creating them and we love listening to them. We’re constantly listening to sound effects, during our daily work, when we’re watching that latest TV series or when we’re sitting in the cinema enjoying big-screen entertainment while munching sweet popcorn together with nachos and cheese (ew!). Sound FX are being fired at us all the time, which is great.
BUT: There’s one interesting sector where sound effects are indispensable and there’s no possibility of actually playing a sound. (No, it’s not farting at the public library or laughing at a funeral).
It’s a really cool and also really old sector. It’s Comics / Mangas!
Comics/Mangas are packed with action, explosions, superheroes smashing things, villains destroying even bigger things. All those scenes need sound effects to demonstrate the power of destruction or to simply create the right atmosphere as we do it every day with the sounding sound effects.
But instead of – for example – layering and editing multiple high-quality multi-channel recordings of our latest Assault-Weapons Construction Kit or choosing the right sound out of our Designed edition, you can just do that:
That’s it! Simple but effective and everybody knows what’s the point. What would BATMAN comics be without the typical fight words like „CLANK“, „OOOFF“, „WHACK“? Well we would have had absolutely no Idea how painful and brutal the fight would have been 😉
Over the years, there’s been developed a word or phrase for almost every sound in real life. The funny thing is that sound effects in Comics haven’t changed a lot over time in contrast to SFX on the screen. A BOOM was a BOOM 80 years ago and it will be a BOOM in 80 years from now 🙂 Okay, some overzealous swots have created some variations such as „KABOOM“ but the core stays the same 🙂
And here comes the next really interesting thing: We all know comics in English language, even Japanese Mangas in English language. But have you had the chance to take a glimpse at a Manga in original Japanese language? You might think that a „BOOM“ would still be pronounced a „BOOM“, don’t you?
Well, Nay! In Japanese Mangas you will see a completely different onomatopoeia as in english language.
We stumbled across a really interesting website that’s called „Mangastudies SFX Glossary“ where some industrious people have collected more than a thousand translation pairings of english comic „SFX“ and how they are pronounced in Japanese Mangas. Simply click the image below.
Enjoy this little excursion on the second day of our SFX Advent Calendar and if you read carefully you might learn the most important „sounds“ and then you can finally put „Enjoying original Japanese Mangas“ on your Bucket List!
See you tomorrow 🙂
Your BOOM Library
