Foley - Behind the Scenes

I can't deny the talent that goes into creating Foley...but much as I try, I can't help laughing at some of their movements!
 
I always love that Foley techniques create the stereotypical sounds we always expect to hear. I went on a course about twenty years ago where we had much fun discovering that real things just didn't make the noises we all believed they did. The best one was somebody being blackjacked with a thump to the back of the neck, falling to the ground. It's in so many movies and impressive TV shows. We recorded the sound of somebody falling to the ground. Oddly, it makes hardly any noise at all. We tried to record animals - the visit to the wild bird centre didn't have an eagle, but they had a very large owl, and when it took off, what we recorded was a kind of phffff noise no flapping wing sounds like in the movies. Walking on real gravel didn't sound like it should either from more than ten feet away. Distant footsteps in gravel are just a kind of hiss, and the close perspective we are used to is only right close - but we imagine the movie version to be correct. The absolute worst was horses galloping. A visit to Newmarket races scared us all to death. The sound track side was scary, but I don't think any of us would identify it for what is really was. The sound of just three horses going past at a moderate speed could be tweaked and fiddled to sound far more like a load of horses than a real load of horses.

Foley is magic!
 
Foley is always one of those cool things to see how they did it.

There's a good video essay about the foley in Fight Club.
 
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