Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487730
64 I M PS E . O R G One funny little thing about first takes... I got caught a couple weeks ago when we were doing a scene of a woman duct-taped to a chair. She is sitting in the chair and she's kind of hopping in the chair moving it and doing all these things and whatever. Katie said I'm just going to have to practice this one. So I know I'm not going to get it on the first time. I hit rehearsal and she does it and it was perfect. I was so mad at myself. SSS: Always record the rehearsals! BH: Yep! Fortunately, when we did it again, she hit the mark again. But there for a minute, I thought, man, did I miss a moment there? Because you never know when those magic moments happen. SSS: How high are the ceilings in the Foley stage? BH: 14 feet, pretty tall. SSS: Do you record all your footsteps throughout the entire show and then go back and record all your props? Or do you record chronologically? KW: We typically just do what we kind of are in the mood for when we get in. Every day is kind of different. Also, because sometimes we're working on a couple of projects at the same time, we may be trying to get more minutes to the mix stage. So it kind of depends on what we have to prioritize and what we have to deliver. I feel like I'm a morning person, so we do tend to start with footsteps more often at the beginning of the day, and after lunch, we switch to props and move-cues. And with the ADR panel, you can easily organize our [Foley] cues based on character. I don't really like wearing heels, I've never been into wearing high heels, so I might try to get the character that has heels on done first and get them out of the way. I might pick that character, let's say Anna, and want to just do all of Anna and get Anna done. We'll put her on and then I can move the mic to any surface that she goes to, get her done and then jump to the next character, and so on. BH: Because our pre-mixes start before we're even done doing Foley, we will work in 10-minute chunks and it to the stage, do another 10 minutes and send it to the stage, and so on. That is just how we do it, I know the processes are different everywhere. We'll do 10 minutes of footsteps all the way through, and we might do one character all the way through first and then go to the next character, so Katie's not changing shoes all the time. And we'll go back and we'll do the props all the way through 10 minutes and then we'll do body noise and clothing paths for 10 minutes, and we work our way through the film that way. We've played around with that process quite a bit. We used to do it just chronologically, just weaving our way through it, and then we recently started spending the morning doing footsteps and in the afternoon doing props, and then we just work our way through the film. SSS: Right. That's the way we do it in Los Angeles. We do all footsteps. Then we go back and do all the props in the entire reel. In features, a reel can be up to 20 minutes. We'll do 20 minutes at a time, just like you do your 10 minutes. It's the same thing. BH: I will give more 'props' to Katie. I think now that she has been able to dedicate her time and her life to Foley, she has spent a lot of time over the last several years on the online Foley groups and really honing her craft and learning and adapting how we do things every day. Katie comes to work and she'll ask, hey, can we try this technique? She's always trying to improve her performance skills, learn and try different techniques, and so I think she's definitely grabbed hold of a lot of the techniques that you all use in Los Angeles and brings them to us. It vastly improved how we do things. SSS: Katie, who cues the Foley? KW: I would say 75% of the time it is me cueing. Bryen, would you agree with that? BH: Yes, definitely, if not more than that. If Katie's super busy and she's performing, then I'll jump in and I'll help her, and I'll cue. But yes, by and large, Katie does almost all of it. KW: For me, it's a time that I get to really get familiar with the film and the story, and the characters and start practicing what I'm going to be doing. SSS: The best way to acclimate to the characters and to the story is by the cueing, because by the time you're done cueing, you know the story inside out. BH: And I think she's also mentally generating her prop lists. If we don't have that particular shoe, I think she's already generating those lists in her head while she's cueing.