The online sample shop LoopMaster.com has a new collection out that specifically targets those creators who love to drop funny/interesting/off-beat bits of movie dialog into their productions. It’s called, sensibly enough, Movie Dialog.

This is obviously created by raiding the public domain and combing through this pile of delightful, strange and awful (sometimes all at once) heap of cultural ephemera. There are all kinds of great bits of dialog or narration to be found in these old films, be they commercial, educational, governmental, or promotional. So they’ve apparently taken the best of some of these and chopped and cleaned them. And since they are charging a fair price, I think this a good idea.

I just wish I had the sense and resources to have gotten there first.

Really, I’ve been doing this for several years now, ever since I discovered the Prelinger Archives at archive.org. Prelinger is a fascinating guy and did a great service to the public domain by collecting/rescuing a huge pile of ephemeral films, donating them to a few organizations and then releasing them back to the public, via archive.org. (Check out the recent Harper’s article on him and his wife for a great look into a couple with a unique vision.) Since they are free to use, spindle and mutilate at will, well, go to it.

1. Download the least compressed version your internet connection will allow. And if all you’re after is the audio, you’re probably safe with the 256kb in most cases. I haven’t been able to discern much difference with the audio. (If you’re after the video, well, HiRes is where you’re going to go, but some of the longer films are pretty large.)
2. Watch the film, but pay attention with your ears. Listen to the soundtrack, sort of breaking it up as you go along into discreet samples. Don’t just listen to dialog/narration, listen for clangs, clicks, stings, hits – what have you – there’s all kinds of fun stuff you can sample.
3. Rip the audio via any number of shareware/commercial/free video programs; I use QuicktimePro. I save it as a 16-bit, 44.1 wav file, because let’s be honest, you’re not really getting any audio quality even if you troubled to download the least compressed version on the archive.org ftp server.
4. Use the audio editor of your choice to chop and clean your samples. SoundForge has a deep set of noise reduction tools, but there are many alternatives. Unless I’m way mistaken you could do most it in Audacity.
5. There you go, start dropping these into your projects at will.

Further bonus fun can be had by using pitch manipulation/correction software to really warp these movie quotes into something sonically unique. I use Melodyne, but that’s not what you might consider cheap. Try dblue’s Glitch VST for some true weirdness.

It’s likely that LoopMasters used other sources for their collection – sometimes you can find dollar DVDs that are public domain films. Note there are a lot of other films on archive.org but not all have the same open-source license as Prelinger, which are mostly industrial films, so make sure you’re clear on what you’re downloading. But really, it will be long time before you exhaust the resources offered to you by Prelinger. Either that or you rely too heavily on movie dialog and you might think about actually singing.

Any other places you like to download public domain movies?