In this week of class, we looked at using props and materials to record foley. This is a vital step in the post-production process in which already recorded sounds are replaced and enhanced to underscore the visual effect or action on screen. An example of this is fist-fight scenes in action movies, which are usually staged by the stunt actors and therefore do not have the actual sounds of blows landing.
We used some objects to create foley for two separate clips. In the first clip, a man walks through a forest with a backpack. Each of us took turns recreating and adding sounds to the session, recording footsteps, fabric movements, shuffling of bags, etc using a shotgun mic to record each. We had to do this a couple of times to get each footstep and rustle in time with the video.
With the next clip however we were tasked with recreating an on screen zombie bite. We had to use creative sound substations or “foley artistry” to get the desired sound. Some of the things we used included, chewing chocolate for the initial bite, snapping celery to create the sounds of bones snapping and peeling oranges to emulate the tearing of flesh.
This is a technique that is vital for me to learn and experiment with. By doing this I am able to emphasise the emotion or tone of my project. For example, exaggerated or stylised sounds like the use of celery to emulate bones breaking are highly effective in creating a more dramatic experience as well as giving me the ability to manipulate the audio to suit the narrative and visuals of my projects. The piece of text below from the article “Sync Tanks: The Art and Technique of Postproduction Sound backs up my claim.”
In the article “Unpacking a Punch: Transduction and the Sound of Combat Foley in Fight Club” the author describes many methods of sound substitutions that they used to generate the punching sound effects for the film. These pieces of text pictured below show how they creatively use sound substitutions to emphasise the aggression in of each blow.
Foley isn’t just using objects to make sounds but also taking those sounds and editing them. In the second clip for example, to make the bite more convincing, the audio was pitched down an octave or so and some equalisation was added. Another thing we did was record “groaning” sounds and use a plugin called reformer (which we used in week 3 initially) to completely transform the vocalisations using the library of sound emulators.
Hagood, M. (2014). Unpacking a Punch: Transduction and the Sound of Combat Foley in Fight Club. Cinema Journal, 53(4), pp.98–120. doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2014.0048.
Wels, E. (1995). Sync Tanks: The Art and Technique of Postproduction Sound. 21(1/2), pp.56–61.