Sound. Part 2. Foley.

Introduction to Foley.

Foley sound is something I've been aware of for many years (never knew it was called foley however). I'd realise that sound effects for blaster guns and punches etc were added at a young age, but I can remember watching a "making of" TV show about the series Friends. It was about the time when it was coming to an end. In that "making of" they showed a man wearing a variety of women's shoes. The explanation was that the character Rachel was known for her fashion and they would dub in different styles of shoes.

This blew my mind, since then and especially recently as I've been researching it I can't believe how in depth the foley sounds go. Everything from a coat ruffle to a door shutting will be re-done in post.

We have been aware of this in previous projects. In Fallout we used sound effects from the web for the blood splatters and in The Payoff we used the BBC sound library to best of our ability.

Using pre-recorded sounds, whether taken from the web or from a sound library as been something I've never been happy with. I've always wanted us to create our own. On The Payoff I made the terrible decision to try and make all the sounds on set. In the casino scenes we got everyone talking, spinning balls and clanking glasses.

In post I suddenly realise how bad this idea was, we had noises over powering the lines of dialogue. If there was a noise like the ball spinning sometimes the cuts wouldn't sink up, because the ball would be spinning in one cut then not in the next. It made a very long difficult job.

I now know that film sound is much like recording a band, which I should have know being a musician. You wouldn't record a full band with one mic, because you cannot single out one instrument. Or like a image in Photoshop, once you merge the layers you cannot edit them individually.

On set you need complete silence so that your dialogue comes out clear. In many films they later dub the dialogue to get a even crisper sound.