Research into recording foley sound and sound effects

Foley sounds

a foley artist is someone who creates the sound effects for films that would be in the background or be something the characters are interacting with or even the characters them selves, foley adds the physical effects of everything imaginable.

its the sound version of special effects, creating lies for our ears.

they would do this by either using props that are similar of items of the same weight or  the same material  or whatever creates a similar sound an example is celery being snapped for breaking bones or coconuts for horse shoes moving or even sheets of metal hitting over metal to create crashes in films.

the reasoning behind needing foley sounds is because the sounds that were recorded on set were ruined or not good enough or even purely were not recorded on the set because they just couldn't get the same quality of audio.

an example for why it would be needed is for horses running and if its a long shot its not going to pick  up the details that foley provides, for a medieval horse ride/chase the foley would provide, the running on the ground, the clanking of swords against belts, human shoes tapping the horse and the sound of the leather seat moving around.

most of those things would be created with odd props to make sound of a good realistic quality.

the skills needed for a foley artist is to be extremely creative to perfect sounds with different objects and layering all these sounds together before they are put together takes a lot of thought so foley artists have a huge range of imagination to get the job done.

also foley artists would need to have the skills of an actor because they have to part real emotion into every action, an example would be if someone was walking with anger the foley artist would have to recreate that and the same if someone was sneaking around.

the foley artists use an order for the sound effects, basic things would start with concentrating on the lead characters movements, which in its self has an order, starting with the footsteps then the kind of clothes the character is wearing if that kind of material made a noise  e.g armour or wet clothes.

after the lead character the extra's footsteps would be created too.

the reason foley is around and there is still foley artists is because no film will have the same sounding scenes as another film no matter the scene,
even if its horse riding scenes using sound libraries will not be perfect because its not the same, so will foley artists make the music as they watch the clip make it perfectly in line and finds to would you need.

also using authentic props will create better sounds  and make them realistic so using foley sounds is better then digitally made sound.

an example of foley that was greatly used is in the star wars films,
they had to use great amounts of creativity here.
the alien and odd creatures required sounds so foley artists had to go out and record animals all over the world then fiddle with the recording in a studio to make an alien beast like noise.
another example in stars wars is the great big heavy walking robots and they required a noise that was heavy clunking and smashing metal, so one of the many foley artists when to a factory that crushes sheets of metal then with other sounds layered with it, it made the perfect sound they needed for the robot.