Chapter 7: Sound

Essay: Foley Sounds and Other Sound Effects

People often confuse Foley sounds with sound effects, but the two are separate categories of sound. Foley sounds correspond to characters' movements and activities (walking, dancing, trying on clothes), while sound effects relate to everything else that makes noise in a movie—animals, cars, machines, and so forth.

To create Foley sounds, a performer, known as a Foley artist, moves, walks, scuffles, dances, what have you, for a microphone in a sound studio, in sync with a film scene as it is being projected. A Foley artist typically wears loose-fitting clothes to reduce unwanted sounds. Foley studios have various walking surfaces (gravel, stone, wood, carpet) for artists to perform on and contain elaborate collections of odds and ends for the artist to use as props: metal bars, balls, glass bottles, cups, bowls, wooden sticks, bats, leather coats, gloves, jackets, different types of shoes, and so on.

Because viewers tend to notice images more than sounds, Foley sound remains one of the most underappreciated aspects of film design. Even many filmmakers fail to fully appreciate the tremendous amount of Foley work done for major films.

Why, you might be wondering, do filmmakers need artificial sounds? Can't they simply use good microphones and record the sounds that occur on the set during filming?

While filming, sound technicians mainly seek to record actors' dialogue as cleanly and as clearly as possible. They don't try to record other sounds at the same time because of the technical problems that might result when they later try to manipulate that initial recording. That is, although filmmakers can largely control and suppress noise within soundstages, their work on location is subject to infiltration by the countless noises of the surrounding world. Say that filmmakers record a scene in a public airport and capture the sounds of jets in the distance and baggage handlers along with the actor's voice. Later, when the director wants to amplify one part of the actor's line, the sounds of the jets and baggage handlers will be amplified along with the dialogue. Instead of the actor's line becoming clearer, all the noise in the recording becomes louder.

Even if the filmmakers recorded dialogue that did not include background noise, their film would also need the sounds of the airport, the sounds of the actors picking up their luggage, and even the distant sounds of jets, other commuters, advertising jingles and announcements on the public address system, and so forth. The regular sounds of everyday life often won't create the proper atmosphere, however, or lend themselves to a particular dramatic effect. They will sound too much like real life and not evoke the particular cinematic world being constructed. Thus the filmmakers add sound effects and Foley sounds as separate elements, which can be orchestrated within the sound mix both for clarity and for artistic effect.

In addition, when films are dubbed for foreign distribution and the primary dialogue track is removed, sound effects and Foley sounds fill in the missing sound that the primary dialogue track would have provided.

The collector's edition DVD of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) includes a special feature describing the work of Foley artist Dennie Thorpe for the scene in which a baby dinosaur is born. While Foley work most commonly re-creates the sounds of actors' movement, especially walking, the Foley work in this scene creates the sounds (or what we imagine would be the sounds) of a dinosaur hatching. In the best tradition of Foley artist ingenuity, Thorpe employs unusual props: an ice cream cone, a pineapple, a cantaloupe, medical gloves, and dish soap.

The hatching scene from Jurassic Park

Much Foley sound work is merely functional. Sound designer Walter Murch explains that Foley sound and sound effects can serve important dramatic purposes, however, as they do in a key murder scene in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972):

The general tendency in The Godfather is to play big scenes in silence and then to bring the music in afterwards. For instance, the killing of Carlo, Michael's brother-in-law, at the end of the film has no accompanying music. In a so-called normal film you would have dramatic murder music, but we had only that sound of Carlo's feet squeaking on the windshield as he's being choked to death. Then his foot smashes the glass and you're left with the image of his foot sticking through the windshield and the sound of the gravel crunching as Michael walks back to the house. Then the music comes in. (Ondaatje 103)

Baggage being handled	Crows cawing
"Hello, Carlo"	[Cut away to Michael]
Strangling	Struggle
Glass breaking during struggle	Cut back to Michael and cue music

For Further Reading

"Foley Artistry."

Ondaatje, Michael. The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Singer, Philip Rodrigues. "Art of Foley."