Random suggestions based on long experience desperately hunting up sound effects at the last minute for many, many projects.
First: if your project is at all professional, consider going to a professional audio studio. They can do amazing work for surprisingly little money. They have huge libraries of sound effects. It's AMAZING how much difference just getting (say) a pro voice over person and some decent sound engineering can make to a project. I've done the entire audio for moderately large projects with less than a day of studio time, which -- in the scheme of things -- is not much money.
I'd suggest you get yourself a copy of Audacity (very decent free sound sampler / editor).
You need a decent microphone. Also, you'll need a quiet place to record -- and anywhere with a PC won't be quiet enough (PC fans are surprisingly loud, for starters). Ideally you'll want a good tape recorder. A DV camcorder makes a great tape recorder in a pinch (they record digitally at CD quality).
As with digital photography, audio is a "garbage in, garbage out" business ... only MORE so. You want sound samples as clean as possible going in, or your end product will sound like crap.
Good places to record stuff:
Quiet bedrooms with PCs and other noisy junk turned off.
Bathrooms. Toilets. (Expect echos.) A lot of splash and "dripping cave" sounds are recorded in toilet bowls.
Outdoors if you're careful.
To give you some ideas:
The TIE fighter sound effect (the whine as they fly by) is a recording of an elephant, stretched and distorted.
Bags of rocks, gravel, beads, etc. can be used to make footstep sounds on different surfaces.
Grab a bunch of things you can rub against each other and bang against each other (different bits of metal, cloth, wood). Record them and then try changing playback speed (and hence frequency).
Upsampling -- playing something at higher speed than it was recorded -- makes higher pitched sounds that seem to be coming from smaller, faster sources. Downsampling has the reverse effect. Modern audio packages allow you to alter the pitch of a sample without changing its duration by using digital signal processing techniques.
If you make sound effects with your mouth, you'll be surprised how good they can be if you experiment with them a while -- try NOT to use your voice, just your lips and tongue. Vocalised sounds tend to sound fake, on the other hand you can make remarkably realistic sounding explosions with a bit of saliva in your mouth :)
Echo, reverb, white noise, and EQ are your friends. A sound that seems corny at normal speed can sound fantastic at half speed with some echo and noise mixed in.
If you really get into sound effects you may find it useful to get a good quality pocket tape recorder and carry it with you everywhere.
First: if your project is at all professional, consider going to a professional audio studio. They can do amazing work for surprisingly little money. They have huge libraries of sound effects. It's AMAZING how much difference just getting (say) a pro voice over person and some decent sound engineering can make to a project. I've done the entire audio for moderately large projects with less than a day of studio time, which -- in the scheme of things -- is not much money.
I'd suggest you get yourself a copy of Audacity (very decent free sound sampler / editor).
You need a decent microphone. Also, you'll need a quiet place to record -- and anywhere with a PC won't be quiet enough (PC fans are surprisingly loud, for starters). Ideally you'll want a good tape recorder. A DV camcorder makes a great tape recorder in a pinch (they record digitally at CD quality).
As with digital photography, audio is a "garbage in, garbage out" business ... only MORE so. You want sound samples as clean as possible going in, or your end product will sound like crap.
Good places to record stuff:
Quiet bedrooms with PCs and other noisy junk turned off.
Bathrooms. Toilets. (Expect echos.) A lot of splash and "dripping cave" sounds are recorded in toilet bowls.
Outdoors if you're careful.
To give you some ideas:
The TIE fighter sound effect (the whine as they fly by) is a recording of an elephant, stretched and distorted.
Bags of rocks, gravel, beads, etc. can be used to make footstep sounds on different surfaces.
Grab a bunch of things you can rub against each other and bang against each other (different bits of metal, cloth, wood). Record them and then try changing playback speed (and hence frequency).
Upsampling -- playing something at higher speed than it was recorded -- makes higher pitched sounds that seem to be coming from smaller, faster sources. Downsampling has the reverse effect. Modern audio packages allow you to alter the pitch of a sample without changing its duration by using digital signal processing techniques.
If you make sound effects with your mouth, you'll be surprised how good they can be if you experiment with them a while -- try NOT to use your voice, just your lips and tongue. Vocalised sounds tend to sound fake, on the other hand you can make remarkably realistic sounding explosions with a bit of saliva in your mouth :)
Echo, reverb, white noise, and EQ are your friends. A sound that seems corny at normal speed can sound fantastic at half speed with some echo and noise mixed in.
If you really get into sound effects you may find it useful to get a good quality pocket tape recorder and carry it with you everywhere.