PRODUCT: The Serafine Collection
WEBSITE: www.frankserafine.com
PRICE: Foley, $1,295; Human Animal, $995; Industrial, $995;
Sci Fi II, $995; Vehicles, $1,295; and Water, $995.
- High-quality,
clean and concise sounds.
- Provides
missing elements that are fundamental and often overlooked by other sound
effects libraries.
- Well-organized
files and names for easy searching.
Here’s a test for your sound effects library: does it have
the sound effect of a brick being dropped? How about the thin metal snap sound
made you when separate the slats of Venetian blinds? (In my library of more
than 12GB of sound effects, neither did I, but now there is hope.)
Distinct-yet-commonplace sounds are often overlooked by
sound effects libraries. Fortunately, Frank Serafine, who has been on the
Hollywood sound scene for over 20 years, has covered these bases with clean and
pristine sound files available through his own Serafine Sound Effects
Collection, which he’s been amassing since 1992.
For this review, I used the following Serafine collections:
Foley, Human Animal, Industrial, Sci Fi II, Vehicles and Water. Though the
collections may not seem as exciting as “Things On Fire, Volume 5!!” what they
lack in snaz they make up for in usefulness.
CRACKING IT OPEN
The collections arrived on data DVDs as .WAV 16-bit/44.1kHz
files, which were easily imported into my searchable database. No copying,
pasting or re-typing of the file names was needed. The file names were concise
and well organized. If I needed a Pontiac peeling out of a parking lot, I
simply typed “Pontiac” and “peel out.” Scanning through the file names, I saw
all the essentials plus some essentials that tend to be missing: brick drops,
hand taps on a basketball, bicycle pedaling without the tire sound, electric
guitar power chords, chopsticks clicking and jogging on a treadmill.
Once I had everything organized, I took a listen. The first
sound I wanted to check out was office ambience. Why is it that “office
ambience” always sounds out-of-date? Who still uses typewriters or dot-matrix
printers? Knowing that office ambience has fallen short in past libraries, I
was surprised to hear that the Serafine Industrial collection had up-to-date
office ambience with computer keyboards and electronic office phones.
Another ambience I use regularly is city ambience. I can
never find the perfect blend of horns, buses, construction and pedestrians.
Serafine covered city ambience in two of the collections I reviewed: Human
Animal and Vehicles disc A-H. Overall I preferred the “Ambience Traffic Street
City” from the Vehicles collection. It had a decent amount of buses and
pedestrians, but I still had to add more car horns and construction sounds.
There is one city ambience file worth noting from the Human Animal collection.
Living in New York City, I often encounter street musicians and Serafine has a
great city ambience, called “Ambience Crowd City Street Rap,” which really
captures the feel of Washington Square Park on a summer day.
Another category of sound effects I use quite often is
footsteps. The Serafine collections offer a large variety and combination of
footsteps. Though most of the footstep effects can be found on the Foley
collection, there are an interesting few on the Water collection, including
rubber flippers in a boat. Beside the usual footsteps you’d expect to find,
Serafine includes on the Foley collection footsteps for: sneakers in a wet
sewer; multiple people together on a wood floor; hard shoes in a warehouse
complete with reverb; boots on carpet, footsteps on dirt; dry grass and twigs;
a fight scene in an alley; boots in the sand; and even horse clops made by a
coconut, which sounds amazing. I used the coconut horse clops in a reality TV
show for the Fox Reality Network, which featured horses. They worked so well
you couldn’t discern which were the real horse hooves and which were the coconuts.
In total, there are 157 different footsteps sound files included in the Foley
collection alone.
I tried to use only the Serafine collections on my recent projects and found that,
though the sounds are amazing, these collections work better as supplements to
my existing library. While working on a TV spot that required exercise sounds,
I found that a combination of my existing library (13,500 SFX from various
companies/collections) and the Serafine collections worked best.
The premise of the spot was to create instantly identifiable
sport sounds over images of people brushing their teeth. So I started my search
for basketball, tennis, bicycling, and various gym equipment workouts. The
Foley collection had great basketball hand taps but overall lacked any kind of
ball bounces. The bicycle pedaling sound from the Vehicle collection worked
well with a tire sound from my other library. As for tennis, there were no
sound files in the Serafine collections that I was using, so I had to rely
solely on my library. If you are looking for the all-inclusive sound effects
collection, this isn’t it. As additions to your existing library, you’ll wonder
how you ever got by without them.
FINAL THOUGHTS
If I had only two words to summarize the Serafine
collections I’d say clean and concise. It seemed like most things were recorded
in a controlled environment with a close mic. Instead of having to sort through
a two-minute long sound file searching for what I needed, the Serafine sound
effects collections got to the point quickly. If I needed a dog barking, each
related sound file had three or four barks; enough for variety but without
wasting time. This is ideal for me, since I do a lot of advertising work where
the key to success is quickness and precision.
I highly recommend these collections as a supplement to your
existing library of sound effects. They are clean, concise, and provide missing
elements that are fundamental. They are now integral to my sound effects
library, and have been extremely useful as part of my daily workflow.
Ron DiCesare is a Senior Engineer at Ultra-Sound Audio Post in New York City. He can be reached at: ron@napny.com.