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The original Jack Foley Stage at Universal Studios is still in operation and features a glass pit, a water tank and an assortment of floor surfaces, including concrete, turf, gravel, tile and metal grating. |
Named for Universal employee Jack Foley, Foley refers to effects created in sync to match on-screen action. Although it may look relatively simple, capturing and creating great Foley is an art.
The DIY Approach
If you have the budget, the best solution, of course, is to turn some or all of your synced-effects needs to an experienced Foley crew. Factored into your budget and production schedule, this may make a lot of sense and even save you some money in the long run. On many indie productions, however, you, as the filmmaker or sound editor, may be pressed into service as the Foley crew as well. Here's some advice for getting results on a tight budget and a short timeline.
On the recording side, you'll need an ultraclean audio chain, with an ultralow-noise preamp and microphone combination to ensure that subtle, extremely low-volume sounds, such as clothing rustles, are kept above the noise floor of the system.
Microphone placement is also critical. Certain effects, such as high-heeled footsteps on a tile or wood floor, don't sound right if miked too closely. At the same time, if they're captured by a mic that's too distant, part of the sharp attack transients in the waveform that provide the sound with the characteristic "click" will be lost. Meanwhile, capturing too much room sound will remove the ability to control the exact amount of ambience needed when you get to the final sound mix. You can always add reverb later, but once in the original track, it's there forever.
Keep your mic at a safe distance from the action. A decent condenser microphone with a cardioid pickup is well suited for close-in work, like paper shuffling or clothing sounds, but when the action gets wild, a short shotgun microphone is probably a better choice.
Think Inside The Box
On any Foley session, the fun begins when you get to work up creative ways of making sound effects. A few well-known Foley classics include stepping on (clean) cat litter gravel to simulate the sound of footsteps through freshly fallen snow or crunching cellophane to simulate a roaring fire.
I once did Foley for a sword-fighting scene. Pulling a thin antique sword out of a metal scabbard yielded a nice metallic sound that was un-mistakable, although recording sword clanging with dangerous and valuable real weapons didn't seem like a good idea. After some experimentation—the key to any successful effects session—the perfect solution came from striking the sides of two different machete blades with ball-peen hammers. The scene's body slams and punches resulted from hitting an old leather couch with baseball bats for thuds and tennis rackets for smacks.
Prepackaged Professional Foley
Getting just the right Foley effects can take a long time and it can be difficult. Some effects libraries, such as the aptly named The Art of Foley or Foley by Serafine from Sound Ideas (www.sound-ideas.com), offer a wide selection of useable Foley sounds. These can be cut directly into your effects tracks or loaded into a keyboard sampler. Besides being easy to "perform," the latter offers the advantage of the ability of varying the volume of each effect, like footsteps, for example, depending on how hard you press each key, and loaded samples can be easily pitch-shifted up and down slightly for more variation.
Like many aspects of filmmaking, the best Foley is completely transparent, which is why Foley artists tend to work in obscurity. It blends seamlessly with the ambient sounds, dialogue and visual action on the screen. Be creative, and take a less-is-more approach. When you see and hear the results of the finished production, great Foley is one of the factors that ultimately makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
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