Foley Artist

[The Foley stage is] a recording studio but it’s different from your typical music or V/O studio because built into the floor are all types of different surfaces: cement, gravel, dirt, different types of wood such as boardwalk, solid wood, high-end wood floors, old farmhouse floors, you name it. We have linoleum, smooth concrete, blacktop, street asphalt, and rougher stuff.

There are two basic reasons for Foley. One, even if it’s recorded well on the day, we’re going to do it again because, that way, they’re going to have every single sound isolated and they can control it in the final mix.

The sounds recorded on set are all on one track and it’s focused on the dialogue. In that process, you might hear the feet and the props, etc., but it’s not in the proper perspective and it’s married to the dialogue so there’s no control over levels. Once you perform Foley, if leaves are rustling too loudly, we can lower it because Foley now has the leaves on their own track.

[For the second reason, an M&E (Music and Effects track) in foreign-language versions of a film:] The final mix contains three tracks: a dialogue track, a music track, and a sound effects track. Part of how a show or film makes its money is by marketing the piece all around the world–they have to make foreign language versions.

For those markets, they deliver the mix, drop the dialogue track and send the M&E track only to the various countries. Then, say in Germany, they will record the German dialogue and add it to the M&E.

For the domestic version, Foley allows complete control over every sound. For the foreign version, Foley offers a full M&E track over which they can add their new dialogue.

[The three basic things that Foley Artists record are] “Number one: feet. We see what a character is wearing, what surface they’re walking on and we have to get a shoe that is going to sound right and perform the steps in such a way that it works for their weight and their speed. We also have to inject the character. Are they scared, are they tentative, are they old, are they confident, angry? All these matter when we perform the feet.

It’s a combination of shoe, surface, performance and mic placement so it all blends with the production track. Our job is to deliver a seamless recording that sounds like it was supposed to be there. People shouldn’t “hear” Foley.

We have slight Foley Artists and heavy-set Foley Artists so really it’s an art that revolves around pressure. We have to get the right “character” into the feet; you want to either hit hard or hit medium or hit soft. A good Foley Artist will be able to perform anyone very successfully.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what they look like, it’s all about what they sound like. I may have a woman’s heel that isn’t a woman’s heel at all, it’s a man’s shoe that happens to sound like a stiletto. And I do also have women’s shoes. Does it work, does it fit, do we buy the sound? Those are the tests.

[On to props:] “On the Foley stage is a collection of thousands of items that we surround ourselves with. Piles of metal and plastic and wood and every imaginable prop that might come up. Within reach, we have full kitchen sets, cooking utensils, books, paper, glassware, binders, anything that might appear in a film.

Some sounds are simple enough: putting down a pencil, writing on a piece of paper, setting a coffee cup on a table. These are items where you can actually use the prop you are mimicking.

There are many ways to put a coffee cup down—it might be rim, then base, or it might slide a little or the character might be angry or it might be set down very quietly. That’s why we never use pre-recorded sounds. Our job is to perform it precisely for that scene, with that emotion, with that amount of pressure.

We actually do a cloth pass first, live to picture. Essentially, we sit down with cloth in our lap and we do a complete pass through the whole show of nothing but movement, mimicking the friction of the characters’ clothing.

So, if someone reaches their arm out, you’d hear a little cloth movement there. Or, if they’re walking, you’ll hear a rhythmic pants noise.

But there are far more complex things, sounds that are not everyday.

That’s where we need to get creative and solve a problem. The process is really simple: one, what should that sound like? Two, how do I make the sound I want? Then we actually have to try it out, poke around and experiment a little bit.

For complex sounds like someone driving a car into a building, something we do a lot is “layering”—we’ll make a sound or an element, say a metallic element, then add more of an organic part. Then we’ll add specific taps and we play them all together and it makes that one sound you were looking for.

We can spend hours layering different elements for a car smashing into a building: the wood, the glass, things falling on top of the car, things hitting cement. Then there are science fiction and horror sounds where you’re creating things that don’t really exist. That’s where things get complicated and interesting and fun because you’re coming up with things that will compound the emotion, making sounds that you never hear.

Foley Artists are independent so you have to negotiate your fee on each job. The union does guarantee minimums, but unless you’re working regularly, it’s a hard road–you have to be ready to go down that path.

You’re standing all day, pushing car doors around, lifting heavy metal, getting up and down off the floor. And when you’re rolling, every muscle is fired and ready to react. Eight hours of that is enough! On top of that, there are no Assistants to clear up our mess–I wish we had them! It’s just two Foley Artists smashing glasses, concrete, everything, so there’s a ton of mess.

We’re now asked to do an awful lot in very little time–the number one challenge is the clock. We have to make a lot of decisions–do we have time to do this prop or these background feet?

If we can get overtime approval, then we will, but if we can’t, we have to do the best we can with the time we have. Time management is such an important part of what we do. Being creative takes time–you have to try this, try that–and it’s time-consuming.

Some shows give you lots of time. I did all of Breaking Bad and they gave us a tremendous amount of time, two and half days on average per episode, and you can tell. Everything is precision done and they used all of our Foley. But that’s a luxury.

[Now, at Universal,] we basically have eight hours to do everything. So you just can’t compare the shows because we had three times more time on Breaking Bad.

We used to have twenty days to do a film. These days you’re lucky if you get ten. Obviously, bigger A pictures give you more time, but the majority have a rapid turnaround.

I don’t buy the traditional feature/television hierarchy that some Foley Artists subscribe to. It’s a fallacy that you have to be doing feature films to be considered a quality Foley Artist.

I sleep to maintain work/life balance!

I was a Sound Editor with my own editorial company in the ‘80s, and we did the complete sound editing package. I ended up getting on the Foley stage and it turned out I had a gift for it and performed all our Foley. When I sold the company, I was trying to figure out my next step and my phone started ringing from my competitors and they asked me to do their Foley. And I did. And I’m still here, still trying to figure out what to do next! I have a job and I wake up very happy to be doing it.

[Contact current Foley Artists and ask] “Would you let me stop by and spend an afternoon just watching you at work?” Tell them you won’t get in the way, and then it’s up to you to ingratiate yourself to the people and, hopefully, come back and do it again. If they like you, they might invite you to come back in and try cueing a session. [Cueing is when you make a list of the Foley sounds that are needed in a ProTools session.]

There are hundreds of Foley Artists in town these days and there’s only so much work so it gets competitive. Really, it’s a highly specialist art form, especially as shows and features are beginning to digitize Foley. It sounds like crap, it’s very robotic, but it does happen. The human element that Foley brings is beautiful and necessary.

I’m lucky having worked pretty much non-stop for forty years. I have around 565 credits on IMDB–it’s insane. I look at that and think, “How the hell did I do all of this?” Well, I never say no, and that’s my reputation. I do independent projects all the time; I squeeze them in. I’m happy working on projects of all sizes and I get called all the time to do smaller things.

If you think you might be good at it, switch on your TV at home and turn the sound off. Put on a pair of firm shoes and stand on a wood or tile floor (not carpet). Then, you literally stand there and as people are walking around, see if you can match their steps.

Props are a little easier, but what really separates the cream from the milk is footsteps. If you find that you can synch footsteps perfectly, stop when they stop, catch that weird hitch in their walk, most people can’t do that and that’s a brilliant start.

Then you have to layer in the subtleties, the softness, the emotion, the ability to stop and shuffle and get that twist of the foot and knowing that when you start to walk your pressure starts slowly and then as you gain speed, you start to hit a little bit harder…these are all things that you learn over time. If you want to see if you’ve got what it takes, experiment with the television.

[Like musicians] anyone can learn to play, but that doesn’t mean you’re great. It’s something inherent, built-in, and it’ll take years to find out.

It’s a team effort. You want to be open to suggestions and collaborations so when someone asks you to try something a different way, you have to be ready for that. You need to be collaborative in that way.

There are some schools that have dedicated Foley stages. I teach masterclasses at the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University; their Foley stage is professional quality, it’s remarkable. They offer a Foley class and you can learn to do your own Foley on the stage. There are other schools with facilities but, in the majority of cases, the stages are horribly low-tech.

Foley is the last of the low-tech arts in filmmaking. We’re still doing things the same way the radio sound effect artists were doing it in the ‘30s and ‘40s.