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www.postmagazine.com 36 POST NOVEMBER 2017 They even did Foley for background elements, like off-screen crossbows being loaded or armor clanging to the ground. "We covered as much as we could with Foley in the show," says Bruce. The Foley was intense, and the team admits that the work was tiring, but "as physically ex- hausting as a show like this is, it's so much fun for us," says Pepper. "We really got to let our creativ- ity shine because we knew that the Foley was going to play in the mix. It was fun for us to know that what we are creating was going to shine in the show." THREE CHRISTS Foley artist/editor/supervisor Samantha Iorio and Foley mixer/editor Nicholas Fedora — working at Smart Post Sound's Foley Stage in Burbank, CA (smartpostsound.com), recently completed Foley on director Jon Avnet's film Three Christs, which pre- miered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. In the film, Dr. Alan Stone [Richard Gere] cares for three paranoid schizophrenic patients who each believe they're Jesus Christ. Three Christs is set in 1959, in Ypsilanti Michigan. To prepare for the film, Iorio pur- chased a variety of era-appropri- ate footwear — different women's heels and Oxford dress shoes for the men. She also located a manual typewriter that plays a role in the film. Dr. Stone dictates his thoughts about his patients and the hospital to his assistant who types them up. Iorio says, "We managed to track down the exact model of typewriter that they used in the film but it was difficult to work with because the ribbon would keep getting caught." Fedora adds, "Sam [Iorio] could only use certain keys and there was the timing aspect to the per- formance. You couldn't just throw your fingers at it. That made it challenging." Iorio and Fedora were able to use Foley foot- steps to help tell a deeper story in Three Christs. The doctors wear hard-sole shoes and their foot- steps sound bold and authoritative in contrast to the softer footsteps of the subordinate patients who wore slippers or bare feet. For Dr. Stone, Iorio chose a shoe "that had more of a tap to it. He cares about these patients and he's fighting for them. We wanted to make him stand out," says Iorio. Fedora helped give Dr. Stone's footsteps more authority by adding weight, pitching them down half an octave with Avid's Pitch Shift in Pro Tools 7. "I also added some room to Dr. Stone's steps to give them more body and depth. For Dr. Orbus [Kevin Pollak], whose of a higher author- ity, I roughly did the same treatment but used less room so that he'd cut through more. His tap sound was more prominent, harsher, to match his character," Fedora says. Since the patients were limited to the same footwear — slippers or bare feet, Iorio had the challenge of making a distinct sound for each of the three main patients. She looked to their personalities for inspiration. "There are three 'Christs.' First, there's Clyde [Bradley Whitford] who shuffles around. I made sure his on-screen and off-screen walking sounded like he was shuffling and dragging his feet. Leon [Walton Goggins] has an aggressive personality and he's unpredictable. His footsteps would start off with this quick, powerful burst of energy and then soften from there. Joseph [Peter Dinklage] is quieter, more musical. He walks very precisely," notes Iorio. Sometimes the flooring surface helped en- hance the story. For example, there's a scene in a lighthouse where one doctor and a patient have a tense conversation. Iorio wanted the floor to sound rickety and a little hollow. "We wanted a surface that was unique — not a typical wood deck," says Iorio. "We found that walking on the closed Foley pit cover provided a rich creak, a bit of hollowness, and a subtle metal jingle that all worked well to convey the run-down character of the lighthouse." Other challenging surfaces were the snow and ice. Fedora and Iorio —both from the Midwest are very familiar with the different varieties of snow and ice. "Shout out to Chicago. We wanted to make that as authentic as possible," says Iorio. In one scene, two people in dress shoes, a woman in heels, and one patient in slip- pers are walking on the ice. "We had to come up with an ice setup so we scoured the studio at 2 am trying to find something that might work. We ended up finding this massive ice block but that was challenging because it was in this big, plastic bag," says Iorio. Walking on a block of ice wrapped in a plastic bag while in heels was no easy feat, but Iorio was pleased with the result. "After being on the stage for awhile the ice was starting to melt and so I got that puncture into the ice initially. We hear that crunch yet it was still solid. We used the plastic bag to our advantage as it added to the crunchiness," says Iorio. Three Christs is an actor-centric piece and dialogue figures very prominently. Iorio and Fedora had to find and create subtle beats within each scene, like chair creaks and paper handling — little details that on a typical film they might not have covered as thoroughly. They used the Foley to FOLEY Samantha lorio (L) and Nicholas Fedora (R). The Foley team created very precise "walking" sounds for each of the Three Christs characters.