Sound for Film: Foley as a Powerful Tool for Storytelling
In Hollywood, everything is magic and make-believe, even what you hear in films. When you watch a film, the vast majority of the sounds you hear were created in a studio: from footsteps on the desert dunes, to a dreadful thunderstorm. Studios rely on foley artists to create these kinds of sounds, and if they do their job right, you will never notice it.
Foley is the art of sound. It’s creating sounds in sync with what is happening on the screen. The art foley, as mentioned in a previous article, goes back to the old radio days, where you would see the sound guys trying to create sounds using all sorts of materials like coconuts for horse steps.
Jack Foley, back then, came and he thought: “What if I do those sounds in sync with the film or the picture?” Jack Foley’s impressive legacy in sound can be tracked back up to the 1920s. Ever since the reproduction of sound effects added to movies and films once the moving images have been recorded is called: Foley.
The foley stage consists of different surfaces, assorted materials, and people: someone in charge of mixing the sounds, and the people who produce them, commonly referred to as foley artists. It sometimes takes a bit of trial and error to get the right sound and to find out what, in reality, works best for a particular sound in a specific scene.
Normally, the foley process starts with the foley artists going through the scenes and the sounds that should happen during those scenes. For that, the person in charge of mixing the sounds traditionally sets a streamer that goes across a screen, which, once it gets to end of the right-hand side, tells the artists when the sound should start. Basically, there’s nothing foley artists can’t do imagination-wise.
It all starts with creating the footsteps of the main characters in the film. Once foley artists have gotten these, they take on all the background footsteps. And once the footsteps have been recorded and mixed, it’s time for them to start creating and provide a proper sound for anything that is moving on the screen. Imagine it is like a big canvas of sound where foley artists paint different colors, textures, and brushes.
Meanwhile, in the controller room, the mixer receives the tracks with all the sounds the team creates. Normally, the mixer listens to the sounds to the picture without looking at what the team just used to create them, as it might end up affecting their judgment, and mostly because the mixer needs to hear ‘how’ it sounds.
If we were to deconstruct the nature of sound, it would be easy to say that sound is simply to elements hitting one another: rain for example always hits a surface — a puddle, the sea, the streets, etc., or, for example, a human face. And that’s all going to sound really different. Those specific little things are the things foley artists need to pay special attention to.
Wind, for example, is a really interesting sound because it’s usually what the wind is blowing through. If a foley artist were to create the sound of a boat going through waves, they would, first, use a leather cape or something to create the sound of the wind blowing through the sails and, secondly, churning water with their hands to create the sound of the vessel going across the sea.
Once the sounds are passed onto the mixer, the real struggle begins. Sounds created in a studio also happen to be subjective: does that sound really depicts the action and the sounds taking place during a specific scene? This a particularly difficult part of the process, and it all comes down to the mixer’s judgment call.
But how does foley relate to the storytelling? In the first place, in order to get the right feel of a character, foley artists really need to know how they’re feeling: are they sad? Are they happy? Are they perhaps in a rush? Trying to relate and empathize with what the character is feeling is pivotal for this part of the audio post-production process, as the sound is a major conveyor of what the action suggests is happening in the moving images, which ultimately helps the audience understand what is really going on during a particular situation.
When a foley artist, for example, reproduces the steps of a character, he or she always immerse themselves into that character, as it helps them to anticipate what they, the characters, are going to do. That way, consciously or unconsciously, foley artists manage to produce sounds that sound way better than what the action in the moving images would sound like in real life.
