Category: foley

When it came to editing the foley our job was quite easy, because almost all of the sounds happened in the centre of the screen and needed to be low down in the mix because they weren’t important focal points in the film, such as miscellaneous cutlery sounds and other little sounds like that.

We did have a little bit of trouble though with finding the perfect level for some of the more important sounds, such as the car engine, the door slamming, and the gunshot sound. This is because I personally found it hard to gauge how much louder and more prominent these sounds should have been without having the atmos and dialogue tracks present as well to relate them to.

This meant that I had to go back three or four times purely to raise and lower certain foley sounds to find the right balance. This also had an effect on our LUF measurements for the broadcasting limits, because every  time we altered, the average loudness of the film would change slightly.

Once we did have the right levels though it was just a case of adding little bits of panning wherever I could to add more of a stereo feel to the film, such as an automation for the engine of the car to come across the screen, and for certain footsteps to walk off the screen in some sections.

Overall the foley mixing was one of the easier tasks of this film because there was no weird or overly creative sounds for us to attempt to recreate.

We started the final foley session with working through all of the footsteps on the film, this was challenging because of the different surfaces that were recorded on, the house was mainly wood and carpet but when Olivia got out of the car she walked first on gravel, then on stone and then onto wood in a very short period of time, which meant that editing her footsteps together would be a challenge.

I was in the Foley studio for this session while Callum recorded. I found this session to be useful because I was able to practise walking and stepping in sync to the actors, as well as being able to improvise on certain sounds, like using different layers of carpet and MDF wood to create a slightly more solid sounding wooden floor.

during this session I also acted out Olivia’s dress sounds, the sound was achieved by slowly stretching clothing out rather than scratching it against itself as we thought that a tight dress would make more subtle sounds than a looser shirt.

During the space of these two days we focussed on recording sounds for all of the spot effects, using the list that we had created earlier we worked through the film in chronological order.

Starting with things like the button on the phone and working through all of the small actions in other scenes such as Luka drying his hands on a towel and the numerous different sounds that were needed for the dinner scene.

For the dinner scene we were able to use some of the sounds that we had recorded before but for certain sections different shots were used meaning that the performance was slightly different, with the actors interacting with their cutlery or glasses differently, so we had to be careful to recreate the performance fully rather than just dropping in the sounds that we had recorded before.

We were also able to look for certain sounds that we weren’t able to recreate ourselves to make a list for the editing stage, such as the gun sounds, and laptop unlock chimes.

This is when we started to work on the finished film. We decided to spend the first session working on all of the different clothes sounds that we could see, starting with the male clothes before moving on to some more spot-like effects such as the bag that the woman was carrying throughout the start of the film which she then places down before the film moves on.

For this session Callum was mainly in the foley room while I was recording. We found that the best way for us to get good recordings was to use the playlist function and loop record until we heard something that sounded accurate to us.

While recording we noticed that the sounds sat into the mix better if we left a little bit of distance between the microphone and the movements, because it gave the finished recordings a sense of space that put them into the picture a little bit better.

we were also able to create a good sound for the car keys being carried by holding them in the same hand as the bag to give off occasional scratching and scraping sounds.