If we didn’t have foley, film would certainly feel funny. Without the right sounds in the right places, films would feel so strange! To get an idea, think about Charlie Chaplin and the age of silent films, which didn’t have foley.
Foley artists and their contribution to audio and sound design span well beyond filmmaking!
Many contemporary genres – rap, hip-hop, electronic music, and more– employ foley techniques right into the music to give it more impact or ambiance. In this article, we’re going to take a look at how this skill contributes to filmmaking, its importance to sound design, and beyond.
Let’s get to it, but first:
What is a Foley Artist?
This is likely a good place to start if you haven’t heard the term. A foley artist is a sound designer who typically works for film and television shows. The work of a foley actor is to artificially input all of the sounds of the film excluding the music.
Things like footsteps, door slams, creaks, explosions, wind, rain– anything and everything. In the film, if you were to attempt to live mic a whole scene the logistics would be ridiculous. A boom mic is omnidirectional, meaning it picks up sound in a 360-degree pattern, however as the origin of the sound gets further from the mic, it is diminished, and usually, it is more important to pick up what the actors are saying!
That means if you wanted to live mic the set of a major motion picture you would need hundreds of mics and it would be a total nightmare. Funnily enough, foley didn’t originate in film – it came from live radio!
The History of Foley
In the 1920s, radio studios began hiring ‘sound artists’ to create the effects live and interact with the radio host during broadcasts. This is probably where we get those ridiculous soundboards that every radio DJ seems to use on their talk shows – but that’s a topic for another day.
It wasn’t until 1960 that a man named Jack Foley would create the actual concept of Foley sound effects as we know it today, for the film Spartacus. He had been working for Universal Studios in 1914 and was among the first sound artists to work through the 20s when the ‘talkies’ came about.
Simply recording sound effects and mixing them back into the final motion picture sounds easy, right? To do this convincingly is somewhere between an art form and a science it turns out.
Back in the days of Bugs Bunny, it was pretty common to hear a cymbal crash whenever somebody would receive a frying pan to the face or some other casual violence, but foley has evolved to be used in new and incredibly effective ways!
Cool Foley Ideas From Recent Movies
In the film ‘A Quiet Place’ for example, which featured blind monsters that use echolocation, the foley team had to do some experimenting to get that terrifying sound just right. They achieved the sound by using a stun gun on grapes and slowing it down until it became this horrifying clicking sound. It sounds like an alien monster all right!
Another film, Wall-E, uses foley to make the communicative sounds of the non-verbal robot. This was accomplished by stringing up a slinky like a guitar string and slapping it with a wooden rod. As you can see, depending on the challenges presented and the vision of the filmmakers, this can be an incredibly challenging and creative field!
While recording basic sounds like footsteps and doors and other realistic, everyday sounds do make up a
good portion of the work, much of it is incredibly creative and just plain fun! Foley artists tend to be very well-trained audio producers and sound designers. To have such a rich understanding of what kind of materials make what kind of sounds takes years of experimentation and learning.
So, where do you begin to learn all of this? Well, a degree in studio recording is a great place to start, and MI is a great place to get a degree in studio recording! If sticking a taser on fruits and destroying a slinky in the name of hearing it cry sounds like the kind of thing that you would enjoy, you should check out the studio recording program at MI, and get on your way to one of the coolest, most creative and downright fun careers that exist!