Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1335010
80 W I N T E R 2 0 2 1 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y BRETT VOSS CAS, LEAD FOLEY MIXER AT HAPPY FEET FOLEY (LOS ANGELES) Brett, you're not a stranger to the pages of the CAS Quarterly, having been interviewed for the "Meet the Winners" issue six times for your six CAS Award wins, this past spring being the most recent. Would you mind starting by briefly introducing yourself and summarizing your path to becoming a Foley mixer? What made you interested in audio and galvanized you to pursue it as a career path? I'm BRETT VOSS, lead Foley mixer at Happy Feet Foley. I'm a Detroit native who has absolutely no interest in cars. Seeing as the auto industry is the driving force of the Detroit economy, it could have been fairly problematic to make a living. So, I looked for anything that seemed plausible. I found myself attending the University of Michigan School of Business for 2½ years. One day, sitting in class, I looked around the room and realized everyone was miserable, including myself. I immediately moved to Florida to learn recording at Full Sail and expand my mind a bit. Afterward, I made the trek to L.A. to "work on content people have heard of." I managed to get a job as runner for Ascent Media Corporate, delivering interoffice mail to their 27 different buildings twice a day. They happened to own two companies that were particularly interesting: Todd-AO and Soundelux. After about six months, the runner at Todd-AO's flagship facility, Todd-AO Lantana, decided he was going to move on and offered me his position. All of a sudden, here I was getting to know people like Mike Minkler, Matt Waters, Myron Nettinga, Tony Lamberti, Adam Jenkins, Marc Fishman, Nerses Gezalyan, Greg Steele, Scott Millan, Michael Keller, and Stanley Johnston. They were sharing ideas and thoughts so freely with me. When my runner duties were done, I would supervise sound on shorts and independent features that no one had heard of before or since. I was able to ask advice from industry titans and put it to use, where only my parents and I would ever hear. But I learned. And I tried. And I experienced. Fortunately, my skills were improving and my sonic manipulation techniques were expanding. And then came that fateful day when I was asked to mix some night Foley. Terrified, I went for it, and I liked it! The work was very satisfying and opened a lot of doors. Your credits span a variety of genres in both film and television. How do you ensure that the Foley performances you are working with are recorded to fit the director and sound supervisor's visions for the project? What types of questions do you ask them to understand Foley's role in the project's overall sound design? We tend to watch a reel or an episode to get a feel for where we think the showrunner may want the show to go sonically. On our first record day, we typically have an informal FaceTime or phone call with the sound supervisor just to ask any general questions we may have, like "What is that surface?" "Is that recurring cup metal or plastic?" or "What is that funky smell coming from reel 2?" This is also when we'll learn of anything we need to be paying particular attention to [such as] an offstage sequence or some nuanced characterization for performance which may not be obvious. In addition to considering the performance of Foley itself, how does your spotting process change based on genre? For example, working on a fantasy project like Game of Thrones versus an action film like Furious 7, would you choose to spot a certain element in a fantasy piece that would be omitted in a different genre? For the most part, the sound supervisor or Foley supervisor will do the actual cueing in a Pro Tools session that I import into my record template. Then we deal with the logistics of that; what to use to make the sound, mic choices, how and when we'll be recording it in the process, and grabbing anything else we think may help tell the story. The process [itself] is fairly similar, at least in linear content like movies, TV, or cinematics for video games regardless of genre. While I'm recording and mixing, [Foley artists] Jeff Wilhoit and Dylan Tuomy-Wilhoit perform cloth for the reel or episode. Then we walk all the primary characters. After we're feeling good with character, sync, and mic placement, we'll move onto the background characters. When all footsteps are recorded, we move into props, usually starting with small hand items, like phones, iPads, wallets, money, goblets, scrolls, metal Jaime Lannister hands [GOT reference], Heikki Kossi, Kari Vähäkuopus, and Pietu Korhonen take a break at H5. Brett Voss CAS with one of his many CAS Awards