Foley Sounds

My second workshop of the year was all to do with Foley sounds, which is possible my favorite section of sound. We started by looking at a couple of different clips including clips from Black Swan, Breaking Bad and Games of Thrones. Looking at where Foley sounds are used, I was quite surprised at how much foley was used, even sounds that could be synced E.G footsteps the sound designer or director opted to use foley instead.

We where then given a Zoom, Sennheiser 416 and a hydrophone (underwater microphone) then a random bag of stuff including, cornflower, slinkies, music boxes, umbrella, fruit/veg and other random stuff. We then split up into groups of four and started to record the different sound.

The Sennheiser 416 was great at capturing the high quality sounds and was very precise when it came to capturing quite delicate sounds like the music box and the crush of the celery. The hydrophone was great at capturing them quite abstract sounds that we often cant hear with our own ears, we attached the hydrophone to the end of a slinkly which created this very abstract Sci Fi sound.

It was really important to have an imagination when recoding these different sounds as with out the visual images it was easier to picture the sounds as something eles. snapping the celery could be breaking someones arm, cornflour could be someone walking on snow. The strangest sound we came across was the toy screwdriver I'm not sure why but to me sounded like a baby dragon crying, not everyone would agree with me on that one but i think having an imagination when doing foley is really helpful, as one sound can be changed and manipulated to sound like something totally different.