So for our big Castlevania project the vast majority of sound in the video are foley sound effects. I've talked about foley before in my blogs when I made a sound library with my friend Tom and it's safe to say I've both learned a lot from then and also still have a lot more to go. The sound effects for this video how ever are much more unique and detailed than anything I've done before so it was quite exciting to get started. I briefly covered in my last blog that before you jump into a project like this you need to be organised. So before we got in the studio and started recording we wrote a detailed list of all the sounds we needed to record to fill in the video.
Above are screen shots of the excel doc that Tom made, it contains every piece of foley from start to finish as well as atmosphere and sound effects. You might have also noticed the times on the right hand side. Noting the time each sound starts and finishes makes recording and editing much easier as you know exactly what time you need to go. I've had projects in the past with little to no organisation and I can say for certain that preproduction documents like the ones I've shown so far can really make or break a project. It might seem obvious but it's sometimes a crucial aspect that gets overlooked when passion for a project is running high and people just want to jump straight into a studio and start recording. Anyway with our list set, roles allocated and studio booked we jumped into our post production studio on campus and started recording. We booked out the C24 studio which has a small foley setup with a box of random items from glass and plastic cups to metal rods and door handles and even some old broken cymbals from a drum kit. This assortment of junk seems pretty worthless but you'd be surprised what you can make from them. Also in the C24 are 3 foley pits which contain various debris and types of surfaces to imitate footsteps and movement on. In terms of microphones we used a NTG2 which is a shotgun microphone which is used in films to record dialogue on set. It has a very narrow but long polar pattern which makes it very selective and sensitive to noise directly in front of it which is perfect for foley recording as you only want to pickup what your recording. As for sensitivity foley sounds can be very subtle so the shotgun is perfect for picking up those minor details. It's only con for foley is how narrow its pick up is so for large sweeping motions like whipping something through the air (which we did a lot) or large gestures it failed to pick up the whole 'image'. For those sounds we used a large diaphragm condenser microphone which might've been a mistake on our part as the C24 has quite a lot of background noise which we needed to filter out later.
From the pictures you can see the pit I mentioned, in the photo I'm using a rock to imitate the horse hooves we needed in the first section of the video. We'd all seen videos prior to the session on how to make horse hooves but the box didn't contain any coconuts or hard hollow items we could use to make that hoofy sound. So as with most of the sounds we recorded that day we improvised until we heard something we liked. This might sound hit or miss but realistically foley is something that you can only plan so much for in advance.
" Foley is the art of performing sound effects to match movement on the screen." (Soundsnap, 2017)
While doing some general research I came across this description on a Soundsnap blog and it resonated with me. Foley is all about deception, tricking the audience into thinking that those sounds are real and natural is key in great foley. While recording our foley sound we had the 'artist' (person making the noises) watching a screen inside their sound booth to both time their sound effects and also see if it made sense from sound to screen. So when we made our list and started recording we didn't always stick to our original ideas because it had to fit with what was on the screen. So you can use websites like Epicsound and Soundsnap for advice and trade secrets but if you're making something unique like an anime or cartoon that isn't necessarily realistic to begin with your foley doesn't need to be believable it just has to fit. So while recording we had a blast thinking of new ways to approach our foley sounds. In the end we learned heaps about how to record foley but the main lesson I took away was always record foley while watching the screen otherwise who know if it'll make sense. Thanks for reading!
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