Jack Donovan Foley the man behind the idea of Foley.
Foleying is an excellent means of supplying the subtle sounds that production may have missed due to director calls in the background. Along with director calls the audio can sometimes be forgotten because of the focus on the actual filming. A good Foley artist must 'become' the actor whom they are synchronizing effects or the sounds will lack the necessary realism to be convincing.The most successful of the sound artists can look at an object and know what sound would match to it. The most common objects that Foley artists use include used bath tubes, pieces of large metal, knives and empty cans. This is because these can all create loud noises which adds its own presence.
Jack Foley was working at Universal Studios when he created Foley. It was in 1914 during the silent movie era. This was because Warner Brothers released its first film to include sound and called for all of its employees to come forward if they had any radio experience. Jack Donovan Foley became part of the sound crew which turned the silent movie 'Show Boat' into a musical. Microphones couldn't pick up sound and therefore other sounds had to be added in after the film had been shot. Foley and his very small crew created the sounds while the film was projected onto the screen, they did this while recording a single track of audio that was able to capture their live sound effects. However similar to the way it is recorded today however now technology has been updated so that they don't have to record each of the sounds on a single track of audio. They can be tracked individually and then synced together. Today Foley employs hundreds of people to do different parts of the production.
In my opinion this technique is definitely still used. It is used mostly in action films, this is because the action takes over from the audio.This makes the audio come out not as strong therefore they used Foley to improve the sound quality so that it stand out. I think this is important because audio is incredibly important in the film and the smallest sounds can make the biggest effect in a scene. I think a lot of people forget that Pixar uses a lot of Foley, this is due to everything being animated. Along with the voiceovers they have to make noises for everything; such as footsteps, rustling of a tree or the noise that an animal makes. Pixar's budget is usually pretty high however some of the items they use to make these noises are very low budget and just everyday items, these included wooden spoons and knives and forks. I think that it is important to remember in Pixar films that there needs to be a noise for everything and therefore the Foley used in it is very important. Here is an example of students recreating the Foley sound.
There are many actions that actors do for Foley some of these include; walking, running, jostling each other, rubbing their clothing, handling props, and breaking objects, all while closely observing the screen to ensure their sound fx are appropriate to the vision.
Alex Joseph one of the biggest Foley supervisors in the world, was asked to recreate the sound of a head being chopped off for 'Kingdom of Heaven'. He said that 'Some people would have gone with a watermelon.' 'Or a frozen cabbage.' Instead, However Joseph decided to do something different by using a green coconut. 'The outside is fibrous. So it cuts like skin. And the hard shell sounds like bone. Inside is the jelly, which sounds like blood. When you slice into it, it sounds just like a human head. I imagine.' Other films that he has does have included 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' and 'Quantum of Solace'. For 'Quantum of Solace' he hired in some scaffolding and mocked up a Tuscan roof with tiles that he bought on eBay, while for 'Charlie and the Chocolate factory' he actually jumped into a makeshift swimming pool with a sack of Nutrient Agar powder to make sure the chocolate river sounded thick enough. He said that he was swimming about in the stuff all day. However “it was very gloopy. I had to take four showers to get it all off.” This shows some of the extreme lengths that Foley artists will go to, to recreate the sound that they need.
College production of Foley
College production of Foley
In college each group was given a 2 minute scene that they had to recreate the sound from. The sound that we had to recreate it was from 'Alien' a Ridley Scott film from 1979 where it is a legendary alien survival horror. In my group I was working with my colleagues; Olivia Searle, Chloe Binding, Sam Shaw and Matt Jury. Before we recreated our sound we had a very detailed plan of what we were going to do and what sounds we were going to use. First up we wrote up each of the different sounds that we needed and how we were going to create them; that was pretty easy to come up. However along with that we also had to create a timeline of how long the sounds were going to last and when they were used. For this we had to watch the clip at least a dozen of times to make sure that we had the sounds in all of the right places.
This was our timeline and list.
Some of the sounds that we had to recreate was steam rising, heavy breathing and footsteps. The steam was probably the most complicated to record and put into the edit because the steam was the main sound through the entire clip, this is because in the clip steam was rising. To recreate the sound of the steam we sprayed deodorant for a couple of seconds and then repeated it in the edit. To recreate the footsteps we had to pat our feet against the sound of the metal stairway. The reason that we used the metal stairway was because the sound of the footsteps were pretty loud and therefore we weren't quite getting the right amount of sound by walking on the floor.
We did one big group edit which I think turned out really well, the sounds were on time and worked really well with the clip, even the breathing which was one that we weren't sure how it was going to turn out because of how ridiculous it sounded when we were putting it together. I really enjoyed recreating Foley sounds because it is something completely different that we haven't done. I also think that it is important to focus on audio now that we have the concept of filming.
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