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November 2016

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www.postmagazine.com 25 POST NOVEMBER 2016 Lunsford. For example, while working on By the Sea, they needed authentic sounding creaky wood floors. When done on a Foley stage, the creaks can potentially sound too "samey." So the team suggested recording the exceptionally creaky wood floors in Lunsford's home. "The client was very supportive of that, and loved the fact that we would go that extra mile. Dawn's house is very ambient, but the film had its own ambience and it was amazing how well the two matched," says Jobe. Field recording opens a world of opportunity for Foley, says Lunsford. "We're not stuck to what we have on the Foley stage. We have endless choices." In working so closely for years, the team has developed their own language to help describe the precise sonic details they're aiming to cap- ture. Their lexicon includes words like "samey," "slappy," "zuzzy," "pockey" and "boxey." They describe resonant tones in specific terms, like "Coke bottley." Lunsford explains, "Often we are trying to describe a sound that is between one very narrow band of frequencies, so we had to create all of these little words to try to make sense of that to each other." For the film Fences, coming to theaters in December, the team needed to create a Foley-rich world that is set in the 1950s. In keeping with the Broadway show that it's based on, the film uses a limited number of locations. Additionally, "there are no guns or explosions, no airplanes, motorcycles or storms. It's very naked, with a lot of dialogue. The sound is very subtle," explains Stevenson. They were given the opportunity to design off-screen scenarios that helped to communicate the charac- ters' emotional situations. To give the Foley sounds the proper perspective, as if they were coming from around the corner or through a wall, Jobe used a multi-mic setup which com- bines the signals from a close mic and a more distant room mic. Only, in this situation, the signal mix was the reverse of his usual approach. Instead of featuring the close mic in the mix, he let the room mic, a Sennheiser MKH 20, play more prominently. The position of the close mic, a Neumann KMR 81, varied — either set off-axis or further away to achieve the desired result. "The off-screen Foley was really important for building tension and even driving some of the story. David did a very nice job of putting those sounds in their proper space while still giving them a presence," says Stevenson. In another unique approach to the Foley on Fences, Stevenson notes that they walked all the footsteps for the entire film first, as opposed to working on the film one reel at a time. Since the story and the actors' performanc- es are so emotionally charged, it was very important to understand what a character was feeling in each scene. "We had to think about that quite a lot when doing the footsteps. I wanted to have the right energy for the mo- ment," says Stevenson. According to Lunsford, Stevenson is the greatest footstep Foley artist she's ever heard. "I learn so much from Alicia every time I watch her do foot- steps. That's my opinion. That's the kind of respect that we have for each other. We feel that we get to work with the best in the field every day." "The conditions here are right for the maximum amount of creativity. If somebody wants to go down a certain path, then we allow that," says Jobe. "There's a complete freedom and that is huge. That is something I value so very much." Fences (here and below) needed a Foley-rich 1950s setting.

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