How it started, and what it is.
(Skywalker Sound's Foley Room)
What is Foley? Why is it used? Why is it so important?
Foley is the art of performing sound effects that you are seeing and hearing. Foley has been around for more than 100 years now and is an integral part of the post-production aspect of sound. Simply put, foley is when a person is performing the actions of characters in sync with the visual medium they are watching. For example, if Tony Stark is walking around the streets of New York what does his clothing sound like? What kind of noise are his steps making? Does he have any props that would be making sound? Foley sets out to answer and solve all of these questions.
Foley was first used in the 1920s in radio dramas as a way to add sound after the fact. Although at this time it wasn't called foley, it was extremely common to add sounds after the live radio dramas. Everything changed in the film industry when Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer in 1927, widely known as the first film to ever include sound. This development sent studios scrambling to keep up, and forced studios to implement sound into their new pictures. Film now having sound, forced studios to recruit sound artists working on the radio to add sound to their films. All of these late-stage sound effects were added in post-production because microphones at the time were not able to pick up anything more than some simple dialogue from the actors.
Jack Foley (The Father of Sound Effects)
Enter Jack Foley, a young New Yorker that composed theater plays and wrote comic books. After a long and successful campaign to bring the film and theater industry to Bishop, California, Foley was able to land a job at Universal Studios. Foley originally worked as a stuntman and a silent film director, but his role at Universal quickly changed. Foley was interested in sound as a new way to create and get involved in a different aspect of the filmmaking process. Foley would quickly become an important sound artist at Universal, working on films such as The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Jazz Singer (1927), and Tarzan the Tiger (1929). After 1929, Foley would work exclusively on sound effects for films.
The actual term foley was not coined until Jack Foley worked on Spartacus, the 1960 film directed by the legendary director, Stanley Kubrick. In a now-famous predicament, the sound effects artists, including Jack Foley himself, were tasked with creating sound for a large number of spartans that were charging in for an attack. Specifically, they were having trouble creating the sounds of the metal swords clanging and moving around. Foley thought up the incredible idea to get different sets of keys to imitate the sound of the metal swords. Thus, the term foley was named after Jack.
Categories of Foley
Foley can be broken down into three main categories.
Footsteps
Movement
Props
Footsteps
Footsteps are often what people think of when they hear the word foley. Footsteps are in basically every project that the sound effects crew works on whether that be films, games, documentaries, etc. Most people would think that watching the video back and synching up the footsteps wouldn't be that hard, but there are many layers to doing foley footsteps.
-The first question you need to ask is what type of shoe is the actor wearing? Are they wearing boots, high heels, flip-flops, dress shoes, tennis shoes, etc.? If you want to be very particular you can try to figure out the size of the shoe they are wearing and also the shape (wide or narrow).
The next step would be to figure out what type of material or surface they are walking on. Sand, snow, dirt, grass, concrete, carpet, linoleum, hardwood, etc. Is the grass dry or wet? Does the pavement have leaves on it? Is the snow thick or powdery?
After you have figured out what shoe they are wearing and where they are walking, it is time to imitate their actions as close to exact as possible. How much weight are they putting down when they walk? Are they walking evenly between both feet? Are they dragging their heels? Are they unintentionally adding some skids when they walk around?
You can quickly begin to realize that imitating someone's footsteps after the fact, is in fact very complicated and difficult. Once you get the sound you are going for though, it will sound lightyears better than the on-location sound recorded on the day of shooting.
Movement
The actors' movement is another element that is added through the use of foley. Many people don't realize that they unintentionally make very subtle noises when they move around. When you are walking, the inside of your jeans make contact, and they make a very distinct sound. When you reach to grab something, the arm of your sleeve usually makes a noise. These movements are usually replicated on a foley stage with the foley artist putting themselves into the shoes of the character and duplicating their actions. Oftentimes, foley artists will also just sit down and grab the clothing materials that the character is wearing and rub them against themselves to imitate the cloth sounds. This can produce a strikingly impressive and realistic sound that viewers would never know wasn't on-location sound.
Props
Does the actor have a prop on them? This is one of the key questions that a foley artist must ask. The sound of a character’s cane would be done through foley. Is the character carrying around a gun? What about glasses or sunglasses?
Fight Club Foley Breakdown
Watch this scene from the 1999 film Fight Club.
You can see that the two main categories of foley are being heavily used. The actors are both moving around making noise with both their feet and their clothes. In addition to these foley elements, there are foley elements that we haven't discussed that are being used. Many times in post-production sound, sound designers will pull from a sound effects library that they have either recorded or purchased. But what if these sounds don't match or sound realistic for all of the projects they work on? This is when different types of foley can come in that are tied into footsteps, movements, or props.
For Fight Club, sound designers Ren Klyce and Richard Hymns were originally breaking wrapped celery in two for the punch sound effects. This technique had been used many times over and was a safe way to add punch sound effects in post-production. Although this was the "standard" for punch sound effects they found that it wasn't producing the sound they wanted. So, they began to experiment with different objects and materials throughout the foley process. Eventually, they figured out that beating a chicken carcass filled with walnuts gave them a wet and juicy punch sound with a strong impact.
This now-famous idea is what makes foley so special. Once the foley artist gets on the foley stage in front of the screen, they can be as creative as they want. Many times the sound seen through your eyes is not the sound that humans are most used to hearing (most foley snow footsteps are produced through stepping on corn starch). Many of these ideas sound so foreign that we can't imagine them matching the sound that is in our heads when we watch something. Yet time and time again, foley has proven that it has a unique ability to make our ears latch on to what we are hearing and seeing, regardless of how strange the sound came to be.
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