For those that don’t know, a Foley Artist is basically a person who makes homemade sound effects for movies. In the Wikipedia page I linked to, it doesn’t really state if it’s still used as frequently as it used to be back in the day.
Anyone know if or if it is still used, how frequently it is used? Because I would think with today’s great technology, recording devices and supersonic mics, it wouldn’t be as needed.
I randomly picked a recent movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. John T. Cucci is the foley artist for that, and he’s still getting plenty of work. Elizabeth Rainey did 3:10 to Yuma and four other movies this year alone, as well as some work for Grey’s Anatomy on TV.
Sound has to sound right, so the sound of someone walking on gravel on-set may not actually sound much like it when recorded. A library of sound effects is useful, but the pace of the steps probably wouldn’t match up right. Most modern productions use a sound designer, as well, which means the sound is all coordinated and manipulated for effect.
That’s not to say it’s impossible to use on-set sound only. Dogma 95 only allows on-set sound, no foley (or any other artificial sound).
And what do you mean by “supersonic mics?”
Sure they are! Link may not be safe for many workplaces, so, just in case: (It’s safe enough for Youtube, but the subject is that of a “porn foley artist”)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zeo5dGh8bnU
My friend, Tom, used to be a sound technicians for theater stuff. He said the most difficult thing is getting a sound that has both the right intent and the right duration.
He had scads of CD and audio clips. He could go through hundreds of train sounds, and none of them was right because he needed something like a steam train… that had no whistle… and than comes close and fades away again… and it has to take 19 seconds to arrive… etc. He could never find something “perfect” and always had to go with “close enough”.
I saw a TV program about the foley artist who does a lot of Simpsons stuff. It was a right. For the scenere where Bart has a crush on his babysitter, and she punched him in the chest, ripped out his heart and threw it against the treehouse wall, the guy dug his hand around inside a pumkin to make the chest “goo” noises, and threw a piece of raw meat on a board and let it slowly slide down.
That’s way faster to record yourself than track down the various sound bits you’d need to string together.
The DVD for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events has a great section on the foley artists.
In the film a hurricane destroys a wooden house, while the characters are in it.
The located a house that was going to be demolished and they went in and did some of the demo work and recorded it. They even dropped the tree from the yard on the roof and recorded it with something like 8 different microphones. You can listen to each microphone separately to hear the different sound ranges those mics pick up.
There’s also a lot of foley work in video games. I forget which one it was, but an advertisement for a FPS a few years back showed how they got the sound for the rocket launcher: they put a condom over a microphone, dropped it in the toilet, and flushed.
God, that made me grin. I love it. 
The was a time where I did a little sound work and I came into contact with a few foley artists. I even did a bit myself.
One of the first things I learned is nothing sounds quite as good as recording the specific sound you’re looking for a specific effect. I’ve got libraries of sound files still on hard drives around my place (which haven’t got much work since I changed jobs) and those files are really good for ambiance and shit like that, but nothing beats foley if you have either the time, facilities, or the budget.
The example my teacher used was this:
Say you want music to sound like it comes out of an old crappy boombox. You can mess around with EQ’s, Compressors, or any number of things and that would do a serviceable job.
Or you can actually record music coming out of a boombox.
It’s not a movie, but you can see this Honda commercial here – they used a choir of foley artists for the effects.
Very very cool.
Does nobody watch the extras on DVDs? You’d be hard put to find a blockbuster movie that doesn’t have a featurette on Foley.
The Bourne Identity (Widescreen Extended Edition) DVD has an good extra feature on the foley art; I think it’s title “The Speed Of Sound”, and it specifically covers the foley work done for the car chase sequence.
In general, almost none of the background sound you hear, and even some of the dialogue, is diegetic. Microphones are set up specifically to catch dialogue and mask out extraneous sounds, lest you lose a critical bit of dialogue to a squeaky car door or a dog barking and force the actor to go to a studio to perform the dreaded looping of lines synchronized to the filmed scene. And you know those sounds you hear when an actor draws a gun and you hear a bunch of clicking and cocking and sliding noises even though he’s clearly just holding the gun in his hand? Yeah, that’s the foley artist getting overly creative. For that matter, gunshots you hear on film are completely artificially generated; in real life, when recorded by microphone, gunshots sound incredibly flat and underwhelming, partially because that’s how they sound in real life and partly because the microphone just can’t record that high of an amplitude of noise.
Along with film editors, foley artists are probably some of the hardest working people in the televison/movie industry because they come in at the tail end of production, after principle filming is done and have a very short period of time to compose an entire soundtrack of ambient and functional noises for 100+ minutes of film. And while the principle actors, the director, and sometimes the producer receive accolades, almost nobody remembers the editor or foley artist. (Scorsese owes as much of his critical success of his oeurve to editor Thelma Schoonmaker as he does to Robert DeNiro. Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Age of Innocence would be good films anyway, methinks, but the editing puts them into the category of great films that were made in the editing booth.)
Oh, and about that “Explosive Extended Scenes” on the Bourne DVD…pfff. Don’t bother watching them; they bring nothing beyond the cinematic cut.
Stranger
I know somebody who is a foley artist. He has a pretty long list of credits and is listed in the iMDB. So, yeah, they still do it; but it’s not a guy with one of those boxes with sandpaper, a little door, etc.
I heard that in the movie “Heat” they recorded real weapons and also in the Band of Brothers and Shaving Ryan’s Privates they did the same thing. Used the exact weapons seen in the film for foley.
Random brush with greatness (??)
My brother in law sells unlubricated condoms by the crate to Hollywood types, specifically for protecting microphones from foul weather, spittle-laden vocal talents and the occasional abuse like being intentionally flushed. Seems that good microphones are very expensive things, and the thin latex doesn’t do too much harm to the sound.
It’s an interesting sideline to his primary business of wholesaling condoms, lubes and “marital aids” to adult toy shops.
I don’t want to think about this too much…
I thought the info on the sound effects was one of the most fascinating of the extra bits on the extended edition DVDs of LOTR.
It’s tongue-in-cheek and I personally find the clip quite humorous. YMMV.
That is a RIOT! I can’t tell if they’re being serious or not.
Okay. Now I’m not sure i want to think about a “tongue in cheek” “porn foley artist”.
I’ll have to have a look once I’m home.
Hee…hee…
Let’s just say it’s kind of in the Christopher Guest mockumentary spirit.