Foley.

I'm really afraid to be closed in or Foley studio

without any windows and just one door,

which looks like the room from

the Panic Room by David Fincher.

As a start I want to present you a clip which can help you to understand what Foley is and what it is eaten with. It is a long one, specially for the most impatient readers (!). So let's have a look at WALL-E.

As you already get, Foley artists create sound effects.
- A short fact: The Foley technique are named for Jack Foley, a sound editor at Universal Studios -

They don't create soundtrack for films and TV - they create sound. They create what we can hear every day or maybe not. It can be a general sound - such as steps, putting your cup on the table, leafing through a book and so on, and furthermore it can be a spooky sound of a strange creature from the parallel universe, which (the sound) can be made by pressing a wet rag.

So, Foley recreates sound effects.

But why is it done? You can ask yourself and also me: "Why should we do all these difficult things if a good camera could record sound as well? We no more dwell in silent films' age!" And that's a good question. It can be seemed that the perfect sound is the natural, the first one, but actually it is not. Because Foley artists do not just replace the original sound with their new version of it, but record a richer track, a track with no mistakes, the one which can immediately show the spectator what is going on. Moreover, it is very useful for creating sounds for objects which actually do not exist.

Foley artists literally become actors. They should be audials - in this case it will be easier for them to work, because most audial people can just throw a glance at an object and imagine which sound it will create if it's used correctly.
There are minimum two people in the crew - a person who records the sound effects and a person who strictly speaking does the main job.


Here is a quote from a site (http://filmsound.org/terminology/foley.htm, 27.03.14) :

"A foley stage often appear to be storage areas for the studio's unwanted junk. Metal laundry tubes are filled to the brim with metal trays, tin pie plates, empty soda cans, hubcaps, bedpans, knives, forks and broken staple guns. These crash tubes are used for anything from comedy crashes to adding presence (brightness and naturalness) to something as serious as a car crash."

Nowadays some Foley studios use electronic sounds and work without the artist. In this case sound effects are made on a keyboard. But this way of doing it is not a good one, because in this case sound effects can be flat, unemotional, dead and repetitive.

But Foley artists can make these sound effects looks real and trustworthy.