Audio Components: Foley and Sound Effects

Foley and sound effects are a major part of film making.

Foley is reproducing everyday sounds that you may hear in a scene. This may include footsteps, a door opening, or a window smashing. Someone called a Foley artist, is responsible for creating these sounds. using a sound proof/quiet studio so that no other sound can be heard, they conduct different actions to get the sounds that they want. Foley is often used in film, to replace or add sound that may be poor or quiet and nearly every time in animation, because noises aren't made by the drawings or 3D models.

Lets take footsteps for example. If someone is walking along a concrete sidewalk, in high heels, then encounters a trail of leaves which she then decides to walk through, the Foley artist will set up a concrete surface, another concrete surface with leaves and a set of high heels or something else that sounds exactly like them. Watching the footage, the artist would then record and repeat the noise to each step very precisely, and then move on to the concrete with the leaves on and do exactly the same. This is then edited over the footage and it would seem that the sound is coming from the shot.

This is an amateur attempt at creating Foley but it works to the same effect. To get the stabbing noise you wouldn't normally get, recording the noises from stabbing and breaking things like a watermelon and cabbage give you the right effect.

Creating sound effects is done in the same way, recording something to replace sound for another object. But its different in the way that, sound effects are normally sounds that arent normally heard or cant be generated, unless a particular sound is warped and manipulated with a number of other sounds to get the desired effect.

For example, in the film 'Jurassic park', there is a lot of dinosaur roars in the film, including the iconic t-rex roar. Unfortunately there are no modern day dinosaurs around to use as actors and provide sound, so the dinosaurs are Computer generated and there noises are created by combining a mixture of existing noises. The T-rex's roar is a combination of a baby elephant, a tiger and an alligator, giving it a unheard of noise that may have sounded much like the dinosaurs back then.

Sound effects are also used to emphasize sound in the scene. This can be seen when guns are involved. The noise of a real gun sounds nothing ike it would in a film, because the sound effect artist normally adds sound and manipulates it to make it sound more dramatic.

This is an example of real gun noises

This is an example of gun sounds used in film (films are mentioned in the video). As you can hear the gun sounds are very different.