Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487730
68 I M PS E . O R G done it, I think I'm on my tippy toes. More of the front part of my foot with my toes. I lose half my feet basically, to make myself lighter. And, it also depends on what are they walking on. What's the surface? What shoes are they wearing? I feel most of the kids I've walked for are barefoot, or they've been in sneakers like on a playground. But the barefoot ones, they're either on carpet or hardwood. SSS: That slap factor. BH: I've seen it done with hands… SSS: I was just going to say that there are two ways of doing children. On the front half of the foot only doing it on the toes, and I've seen Foley artists use their hands. They put their hands in the shoes and perform the footsteps, and I've also seen Foley artists sit to take the weight off. But you've got to make sure that what you're sitting on doesn't make a sound. BH: Creak or squeak! SSS: Thank you! [Laughter] That's exactly right. Because a folding chair squeaks, but a wooden chair creaks, so whatever chair you use to record children, make sure it's not squeakin' or creakin'. Katie, do you record weapons? Movement only, you don't shoot a gun on the Foley stage, but you definitely have to be able to handle a gun on a Foley stage. KW: Yes, we do record props as handling weapons. We're actually working on a project right now that has a lot of different types of guns in it. I was actually saying I probably need to take a weapons class so I can educate myself. SSS: There is a very specific way because of the way Foley artists record guns ... if my gun sounded like that, I'd throw it out. I'd get my money back. Guns do not rattle. It drives me crazy when I'm watching a movie and the gun is rattling while they're pointing it around and you can hear it. No. Guns don't rattle. It's a sound cheat to give it life. BH: No, they sure don't. But it's one of those accepted movie things. It's like the bag of groceries. It always has celery and a French loaf of bread sticking out. It's just one of those things. We don't have any weapons on our Foley stage, but we do make good use of other things that can sound like a weapon. We have a metal staple gun that sounds really cool. What's the other one we've been using, Katie? KW: My go-to is a hand drill. The staple gun is good. The nice thing with the drill is it has a little bit more weight to it. SSS: Now hearing your own Foley on a Foley stage and hearing it in the booth is different, the translation from the stage to the booth is very different. It's really hard to identify if it's actually working or not, so you've got to trust your mixer. If the booth says, "No, we need more low end, or no, that's not high enough." Sometimes they can't tell the Foley stage what they're hearing in the booth, and many times I've had my Foley artists come into the booth to play back a cue so they know what direction to go. Translation is everything. BH: This was one of the changes we made when we went to the new space. When we were in the old space, we had a separate control room from the performing stage. At this studio when I'm recording, I'm right on the stage with her. I'm on headphones, or I'm just listening in the room. Depending on if it's the really subtle, quiet stuff, I'll throw on headphones and make sure it's sounding the way I want it to. It's been a little bit of an adjustment for me as the mixer because I was so used to hearing it through the microphone preamp speakers, and hearing what it was doing. It's been a little bit of an adjustment here, but we have a couple of sets of speakers right here on the stage, so if we need to hear that back, we pop the speakers on, play it back and hear what it's doing. That has been working pretty well. We haven't had too many problems. But after we've recorded the Foley, we've edited it, mixed it, and we send it off to the re-recording stage, then we hear what it's doing there once it is mixed in with the dialogue, backgrounds, and everything else. Sometimes things don't work the way you wanted it to. One example I have of that is we have a really great, creaky wood floor. Katie can attest that it seems like every movie we do is shot in a Chicago apartment with creaky wood floors. So one day, we went over to this great place in Chicago where apartments and houses were getting redone and they had taken up the wood floors, and took out old doors, and so forth, and the whole space was just filled with door handles and hinges and cabinets and all this really cool stuff. So we went there and just wandered around for an afternoon and we were finding a lot of stuff. I found a whole bin of old wood, real hardwood. So I took it back to the studio and I built a hardwood floor, and it creaks brilliantly. The problem is, it almost creaks too much. By the time we get it to the dub stage, and they're mixing it in, sometimes the only thing you hear are the creaks, so it's always a little bit tricky, but it does sound really great. Sometimes when it's mixed in with the other content, it might not work quite as well as we wanted, missing some of that low-end footstep kind of stuff. We run into that more often than not when it's being mixed with the other tracks. SSS: But the advantage you have is you have an in-house Foley stage, and you can fix it. BH: Yep, and we do. And Jamie or whoever's mixing will let us know, "Hey, this isn't working. Can we try something else?" There are times though when I feel good about it and I have to say, "You know what? I love the sound of it. Make it work. "And he does. SSS: Katie, what is your favorite project that you've worked on performing Foley so far? And why? KW: Hmm, the last project I worked on, Rupture, is a feature film that is not out yet. The reason that is my favorite project is that the villain character was just really fun to walk for. I haven't had the chance to walk in a lot of shows with the villain in long close-up shots of their feet slowly approaching whatever they're getting to, whoever they're about to do something bad to. I've seen a lot of movies with that and I feel like those close-up shots of the foot, you get to hear the footsteps, or maybe music ducks away and it's a chance for us to really feel close to this villain and start to get really creeped out about what they're going to do. So I really, really laid into the feet of this character, and I just loved any time I got to walk for him.