Reactions: Small Crowd

A wide variety of different crowd reactions are always useful.  I think it’s great to be able to shape your FX tracklay for a crowd scene so that the sound doesn’t solely depend on the crowd ADR for energy, dynamics and narrative.  Sure, you do often need to lay a more generic ‘bed’ for the crowd presence but when you add any necessary ‘ooh’s!’, ‘aah’s!’ and cheers, etc. on top of that the scene can really come to life – and also helps any crowd ADR that you do shoot to sit into the mix more naturally.

Bearing in mind that I may run a theme for large crowd reactions in the future, I’ll describe how I’m going to distinguish between the two sizes of crowd.  For now (I can always adapt the collections in the future if necessary), consider this small crowd collection to be for groups of, say, 5 people (e.g. watching sport in a bar) to 200 people (e.g. cheering at a concert in a small church hall).  Less than 5 people may be getting a bit to close to the realms of crowd ADR and start requiring the use of release forms, so we’ll steer clear.  I may need to eventually cater for a ‘medium’ category but, for now, I’m imagining the other ‘large crowd’ collection to cover small concert halls to stadiums.  Despite all my examples being interior, the crowd reactions that you share can be interior or exterior recordings.

I must emphasise that this theme is for crowd REACTIONS!  General chat tracks won’t be accepted unless they contain the reactions within, in which case it’s obviously counter-productive to remove the ‘vibe’ that surrounds the important boos, cheers, gasps, etc.

That’s it!  I really can’t think of any other conditions that need to be spelled out.  Oh, apart from please state your location / language in your track name or metadata.  This is always important for recordings shared with the Club but especially so when voices are involved.

Lastly, the more the better.  If possible, it’s great to have a few reactions in a recording in case the scene calls for it.  Otherwise, you end up searching for other recordings that match in terms of crowd size and acoustics, which is a bit dull.