More fun with Foley

By happy coincidence, a friend of mine in Beijing sent me this link a few weeks ago - quite unaware that I was teaching a course on 'Sound in Film' at the moment.

Evidently this 'musicless video' idea has become quite a fad on Youtube in the last couple of years, but I hadn't come across it before. This is a particularly imaginative one, recreating what might have been the 'live sound' during the shoot for the famous video of Mick Jagger and David Bowie covering Dancing in the Street for LiveAid.

This provides one possibility for the final assessment project for my students on this course unit (although I think most of them will choose a more straightforward piece of dramatic action to re-record the soundtrack for, such as this). [The original video can be seen here.]

This version of OK Go's award-winning treadmill routine for their song Here It Goes Again is perhaps even better (or maybe it's just that I've always loved the original video!).

Both of these soundtracks were created by Youtuber Mario Wienerroither.

Getting creative with sound

Movie sound designers most enjoy the challenge of creating 'design effects' - sound effects for things that don't actually exist in the real world (futuristic technology, etc.), or things that are real but can't readily be recorded (volcanoes, nuclear explosions, etc.).

WatchMojo's 'Top 10 Movie Sound Effects' here are mostly such 'design effects' from sci-fi films, but.... the list culminates with a vocal effect created by an actor (and used in dozens of movies over the years), probably the most famous sound effect in cinema history: The Wilhelm Scream.

Movie sound is not always realistic

Here's another fun roundup of common film sound effects that I've used with my Film classes sometimes. With many of these it's not obvious what the 'unrealistic' aspect is. Not all snakes are rattlesnakes, and rattlesnakes don't rattle all the time - especially not when they're stalking prey. It's a real noise that's often used in an unrealistic way. Similarly, keyboard 'clack' is real, but - other than with a really old keyboard! - it's usually too quiet to hear at any distance; in the movies it is usually greatly amplified, to focus attention on the person at the keyboard... and on wondering about what they are writing. Car tires squeal, but not quite as much or as often as they do in movie car chases (and you can find out how they make that noise here; it's not usually recorded live from the cars). Real-life screams mostly don't quite sound like movie screams. And so on...

The movies have evolved a number of conventions for how they portray various sounds: many are somewhat exaggerated, a few are actually quite unrealistic. But we are so used to this now that the real sound wouldn't sound 'right' to us in a movie - it wouldn't sound real!

Foley everywhere

I think I've been having even more fun with my Film classes' current study unit on 'Sound' than my students have. The craft of Foley - adding in sound effects in post-production, often by means of ingenious fakery - is endlessly fascinating, and easily grows into something of an obsession.

At the weekend, rattling knives and forks in a tray of cutlery in my kitchen, I discovered that I could make a pretty fair approximation of the clatter and tinkle of glass breaking this way - especially if I used a small glass bottle to rattle the knives, giving the right 'glassy' note for the initial impact. Finding a way for my students to create a breaking glass noise, without the mess and waste and danger of actually breaking glass, has been a preoccupation of the last week or two!

Yesterday I found on the floor a strip of plastic backing from the index stickers we use in the Library. I picked it up to put it in a bin, but when I heard the scrunch it made when I rubbed it gently between my fingers, I put it in my pocket instead, thinking, "This would be great for a crackling log fire noise!"

And tonight I was just passed by an old lady on a bicycle, one of our cleaners, I think. It was a battered and ancient bicycle, and it emitted a loud, rhythmic rusty wheeze as it trundled along - I swear it sounded just like the honking of a goose. I wanted to run after it with a microphone...

As I say, this is a dangerously obsessive topic!

An exemplar for the assessment task on Film Sound

One of my students, Vanessa Tidmarsh, unearthed this wonderful little exercise on YouTube a few weeks back. The poster took a short clip from an obscure early '60s B-movie, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, and recreated every element of the soundtrack for it (then added insert frames showing how he did it).

This is a useful example to guide and inspire my Film classes, whose culminating assessment task in their current unit on Sound will be to do exactly this (although their 'making of' film segments can be presented as a separate mini-documentary rather than inserted alongside their original clip). I'm looking forward to seeing - and hearing - what they come up with.

Some more Foley ideas!

I think this was an April 1st post, and so not to be taken entirely seriously. It is nevertheless a useful introduction to the importance of post-production sound... and to the mischievous creativity required of Foley artists. (I think that thing with the grapes might just work. I certainly want to try it!)

Foley in the great outdoors(?!)

Another great video that my students have enjoyed recently about sound design and the art of Foley sound effects is this - explaining how faked sound effects even need to be added to wildlife documentaries. I observed ruefully to one class that this is a bit like having a magician show you how a trick is done; it tends to compromise your enjoyment of the rest of the show. It is an excellent tutorial on the use of sound in TV and movies, though. (And the scene where a cameraman gets cornered by a lioness is priceless!)

This production company, Earth Touch, have several other fascinating videos on their YouTube channel.

A great introduction to the art of Foley

Foley - the art of creating synchronised sound effects for movie scenes in post-production, often faking them by ingenious and improbable methods (and named after the great pioneer of the field, Jack Foley) - is the main focus of my Film classes during the first half of this semester.

There are scores of interesting videos online illustrating Foley techniques, and the students and I have been sharing many of them over the past few weeks. This one has been our favourite so far.