Child’s Play

AKA ‘Junior Street Voices’!

The easiest path to take for this theme would be to get recordings near schools or play parks.  However, as well as it being a tad creepy hanging around these places, I would argue that these will not be the most useful sounds to have in the collection.  As with the Street Voices theme, I think the most useful recordings will be of small groups or couples of kids in the street (or any exterior space for that matter) playing or simply shouting to each other.

Obviously, playground chatter is useful if you’re working on a scene in a school.  However, isolated kids’ shouts aren’t site-specific.  They are very evocative and are therefore a go-to sonic effect to describe a location, e.g. Broadly speaking, yobby shouts suggest feral kids and therefore a rough area.  Cutesy voices of kids playing games suggests a more idyllic, ‘safe’ setting.  A variety of different recordings such as these are invaluable in any FX library.

I will accept recordings of larger groups of kids too, as it will become a pain differentiating between group sizes otherwise.  I’m just emphasizing that recordings of smaller groups of kids are the most useful in my opinion.  Interior recordings will be accepted too (mainly because I can’t really imagine ‘Interior Kids’ being a future theme in it’s own right) and kept within a subfolder of the collection.

I’m also presuming that your recordings will be made with at least a little bit of distance between you and the subject, otherwise this enters the realm of crowd ADR.  However, this is not a rule and closer recordings will, on the whole, be considered acceptable too.  Oh – one last thing – let’s agree an approximate upper age limit of about 10-12 years old?  Otherwise, I think it’ll get tricky deciding whether a recording should go in this collection or ‘Street Voices’.