Right, earlier I had some things to say about how fun our educational time in the foley stage was, but folks, it ain't got nothing on the experience of actually foleying one's own movie (or one's foley partner's movie).
Foley is sort of a bizarre line of work: these little sounds are not money like those carefully designed explosions that keep winning Academy Awards (don't get me started-- like I told my mom: that show was only fun to watch because I was drunk) for sound design, and yet when it's done well, it totally sells the image as real.
I started off in the booth, with Jordan and Mary making sweet sweet foley music with the shotgun mike in the studio. Damn, that Mary is a fine foley walker. She stood in one spot and got the shot of the feet coming down the stairs on the first take! I wasn't even recording it! I was just showing it to her so she could get the pace! Genius!
And it's amazing how much the actual kneading of dough doesn't actually sound like the kneading of dough. I didn't actually see what the two of them did to get a dough sound in the end, but it sounded great. The cup-fuls of flour being dumped sounded great too. It is for reason really really exciting to hear that exactly perfect sound match up with your heretofore silent movie. And it made me really happy to see Jordan grapple with the sticky mess of half-made dough. He's hid his pristine self behind the camera for too long.
If Mary's a good foley walker, I'm a good foley sitter. Maybe it's because it's actually my old Volvo in Mary's movie and I know its creaks, but replacating the noise of someone easing into the driver's seat with an old office chair proved to be my area of expertise. It was also really fun to make the movement/cloth track, which mostly consisted of rubbing one's clothing-clad sections of body in a way that, to a casual observer, was probably a mixture of titilating, disturbing, and just bizarre.
Foley is a strange kind of art because you are often trying to get into the rhythms laid down by the actor and the editor to create real-sounding noise in an environment often completely unrelated to the action on screen. It's hella fun and exhilirating for precisely the same reasons.
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3 comments:
I am worst folly artist in Los Angeles.
The room smelled bad too didn't it?
i happen to disagree; i think you're very good at folly.
and yes, the room smelled bad. like ass, as they say. mold in the water tank, apparently.
Alex isn't bad. He just won't wear women's shoes. He'll wear the dress...but that's a story for another day.
Robyn, your talk of bread makes me yearn for sandwiches.
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