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Foley: Live Sound Effects

Live Performance

In performances before studio audiences, foley adds considerable visual interest. A foley walker for such a set-up needs stage presence, showmanship and a good ear. S/he also must know when to give and take stage, for a real hambone working the sound effects can easily upstage the actors. Perhaps that explains why radio sfx personnel in the old days belonged to AFRA, an actors' union. 

Typically, the foley gear is arrayed on and around a table off to one side of the stage or performance area. One mike covers the table and another the floor.  The table mike never sits on the table but is shock mounted on a floor stand high enough to capture vocal effects, such as dog barks, hoot owls, raspberries, gurgles, bubbles and assorted moans and groans. One or two foley walkers, more if needed, do all the live sound effects. 

Some sounds that are typically foleyed before a studio audience are best prerecorded. Firearms, for instance, are dangerous and all too frequently — that is to say, more times than not — fail to go off on cue. Recently, doing a Western at the L.A. Theater Center, our foley guy had to shoot off a few six guns. He brought two blank pistols and a cap gun just in case. None of them worked during the performance. He should have brought  a stout flat board as well. A standard back up for gun sounds, the board gives a so-so gun-like crack when smacked smartly against a hard surface. Alternately, you can do more-or-less convincing gunshots vocally, by making a guttural sound (as in Bach, Khanukah) close to the mike and holding it — "Khkh! Khkh! You're dead!" With practice, quickly blowing — poof, poof! — right into the mike's diaphragm makes a nice cannon.

Conversely, some effects typically prerecorded are best foleyed. Ambiances, for instance. At any rate, you shouldn't use a particularly realistic ambiance. Your foley and voices necessarily sound as if recorded or transmitted from a theater, which they are. A realistic background of a factory, say, or sylvan glen or city traffic will clash with such a foreground.  Instead, an often purposely artificial-sounding ambiance is introduced as a scene starts so as to set the scene, then unobtrusively snuck out when it's job is done.

Foley in the Sound Studio

Even under controlled conditions without an audience in the studio, I find foley important because:

When recording in stereo, especially when using a stereo mike or area mics, the foley walker(s) pad around the room so that their sounds can be heard in the proper stereo perspective. Talent does their own footfalls. "Wear hard-soled shoes at the session, boys and girls!"  When recording in mono or when talent is being recorded onto separate tracks, you can set aside part of the room as a foley area, which makes life easier for your walkers.

The question arises: what to foley, what to lift from a recording. Well, theater people distinguish between "practical" props and set dressing. A practical prop is any object on stage, aside from furniture, that actually gets used. In such a way we can identify "practical" sfx as  any discrete (i.,e, non-ambiant, relatively short) sound effect that must be heard to advance the action.  Any such "practical" sound that you can possibly foley, you foley.

In principle, at any rate. In practice, any number of factors can influence how and what you foley — your access to gizmos and recordings, the skill of your walker, the size and configuration of the recording environment, etc. As with every other rule in this book,  this principle must be tempered with common sense and imagination, especially as few if any of us in America today work under ideal or even professionally acceptable circumstances for audio drama.

Samplers provide the most efficient foleying capacity. After loading effects into a sampler, you can play them out on a keyboard as needed. So many electronic adjustments to and combinations of the sampled sounds are possible that you can virtually quadruple your sound library on the fly. Typically, you load in sounds that you anticipate using frequently — footfalls, doors, telephones, etc. Exotic effects that may crop up only once may not be worth the effort of loading in. A sampler obviates the need to build or acquire a foley kit for studio use.

The Basic Foley Kit

Please note that, of the items discussed below, some are useful on stage before a studio audience (e.g., wind machines, thunder sheets), but unnecessary or undesirable otherwise. Some must be handmade, but you can find many others in shops that purvey percussion instruments (anvils, horses' hooves, slap sticks, tubular bells, and wind machines are sometimes called for in symphonic and show music), party favors, hardware, toys, and groceries. A junkyard is also an excellent place to shop for raw materials such as doors, thunder sheets, and door frames. Here is what one typically finds in the sfx closet:

Wind Machine

A sheet of canvas over a revolving drum of wooden slats. The fierceness of the wind is determined by the speed of the revolution. The drum is turned unevenly, for wind never blows at a constant speed. Adjusting the tension of the canvas at it's free end can also alter the sound.

 

Rain Box

2 Wooden boxes  6' x 6" x 6", the floors of which are studded with nails hammered up from outside. Dried peas inside. Boxes are see-sawed to make the sound of rain.

Thunder Sheet

Suspend a sheet of galvanized iron from a plank or pipe. Affix a handle. Rattling the iron yields affective thunder. The larger the metal, the more substantial the thunder.

Free-standing Door

Solidly built wooden door frame on casters with one or more doors mounted in it, often with several kinds of knobs, locks and latches. The knob turning is important for opening sounds. The catching of the latch is important for shutting sounds. Sometimes two different types of doors are built into one frame, such as a house door on one side and a screen or jail door opening from the other. Free-standing windows and car doors are also used.

Gravel Boxes and Footfalls

Shallow boxes large enough to stand in filled with gravel, dirt, crumpled paper (for leaves), artificial grass, etc. Stomp in them to make various footfall sounds. Foley walkers also keep on hand various flooring fragments — marble, woods of various thicknesses,  a slab of concrete — as well as a portable stair unit and several kinds of men's and women's shoes. Muddy, slushy footfalls are often done with damp sponges in the gravel boxes instead of the foley walker's shod feet. In the '40s footfalls were conventionalized. Men's had a heel toe double sound. Women's had only one sound as if all women wore high heels that forced them to place heel and toe down together.

Bell/Buzzer Board

A box or plank upon which are screwed various bells, buzzers, buttons and switches. Can be rigged to work on batteries or to plug in to a normal outlet.

Marching Men

Identical wooden pegs fastened to a frame at the top by flexible or elastic bands,  so that pegs dangle down. When held by the frame and plopped rhythmically on a hard surface, behold! an army.


from a CBC photo

Boinger

Resonating body made of ½" wood, steel wire, and flexible wooden neck. The face is 1/4" three-ply. The wire is 10-gauge .024" diameter tinned music wire. To get the "boing",  pluck the tautened wire and shake the box vigorously so the neck vibrates. In addition, you can buy or rent a "flex-a-tone" from any music story that sells percussion instruments.


Squeaker

For doors and other squeaks. A dowel or wooden cylinder is battened down so that it is perpendicular to the floor and unable to move. A removable, hand-held wooden vice snuggly grips the dowel near the top end. Rotating the vice produces the squeak.


Corn Starch Snow

A standard box of corn starch is squeezed to make the sound of walking on snow. All seams and  edges must be securely duct-taped shut to prevent the powder from leaking.

Three-legged Coconut Shell Horse

Yes, Virginia, the scooped out shells of a coconut make excellent horses' hooves. So does drumming fingers on a vinyl-covered binder. Golden Age radio often employed the convention of the 3-legged horse. A 4-legged gallop was too difficult for most sound men, but a duh-duh-dum duh-duh-dum duh-duh-dum was easy. So, most radio horses are amputees.

Paper Cup Telephone Filter

A paper or Styrofoam cup held to the side of the mouth makes a satisfactory phone filter. A metal trash can held up in much the same way can add cave-like overtones to the voice.

The Bat and Melon Ploy

For head trauma, use a melon. Whack it hard with a baseball bat or mallet when you need to bash in somebody's skull. In live performance, a watermelon is more visually impressive than any other kind. Also messier.

Telephone Receivers

Modern and vintage receivers, including pay phones, can be borrowed or rented from local phone companies, who routinely make them available to theater companies. 

Fire

Crinkling cellophane makes convincing fire sounds. But large fires not only crackle but hum or roar as well, so cellophane must be augmented somehow.

Bucket, Plunger, and Tub

For splashes, fill a slop bucket a third to half full of water. Quickly jerking a plumber's friend out of the pail makes a better sound than plunging in. Some sophisticated film foley stages and European radio studios have large vats or pools sunk into the floor for water effects. Most of us have no access to such facilities. When you need more than a simple splash or two, an old, large porcelain bathtub, picked up from a junkyard, will suffice for all sorts of water effects.

Body Slam Dummies

Mayhem on real humans does not making convincing sounds of mayhem on humans. Therefore, you need not devote one of your human beings to being on the receiving end of falls and blows. This is a good thing since it's difficult to persuade foley walkers to get punched, smitten with blunt objects, and pushed off precipices. (Foley walkers are very temperamental that way.) An adult-sized rag dummy made of wood, soft stuffing, and burlap is handy for body blows and body falls. Punching the dummy has the residual benefit of giving the foley walker a vent for aggressions that might otherwise be taken out on the director. (We directors can never be too careful!)  However, most foley walkers prefer punching pillows for body blows, clubbing melons for head blows, and dropping for body falls. So often do characters drop to the ground in radio plays that a technique has developed. Instead of dropping to the floor, the foley artist falls forward on to the sfx table landing the forearms on the table top, one at a time in quick succession, ka-PLOP. 

There's a trick to slaps as well. Slap the upper parts of the fingers of one hand into the hollow of the palm of the other. Doing so produces a fairly loud slap that sounds as if the blow were heavier than it really is. 

Applause

No special gizmo does applause. Generally, the talent does it when called for in the script. You don't just clap hands. You use both hands to slap your thighs. Doing so gives the impression of a larger crowd than you actually have.

Bubble Machine

Simply a soda straw and container of liquid — water for smaller bubbling and something more viscous for large bubbles.

Crinoline

In producing a costume drama, keep in mind that in most of the 19th century, women's clothes were noisy. Skirts were padded and stiffened with crinoline. Petticoats in other eras, up to the 1950s, also rustled. To give a sense of the times, rustling should accompany the female footfall. Dry cleaner's plastic does the job better than a fabric.

Guns

Starter pistols look great for a studio audience, but are notoriously unreliable, even when the foley walker keeps a back-up pistol handy. A better back-up is a piece of plywood a little smaller than a baseball bat. Slapping it smartly against another piece of solid wood yields an acceptable bang. However, no live effect is all that convincing to the ear, so, when NOT performing before a live audience, use a recorded effect.

Whistles 

  • train whistle

  • slide whistle

  • police whistle

  • siren whistle

  • various bird whistles

  • kazoo

Miscellaneous Noise Makers

  • Jew's harp

  • crash box (large, closed cardboard box filled with broken glass and shards of various hard materials, which can be shaken for crash effects)

  • air and car horns

  • 1/2" plywood board and 2" x 4" (sliding the latter against the former substitutes for drawers and windows. Some foley walkers prefer free-standing windows and handmade drawer units).

hand-cranked siren

Contents • Intro • Gimme a break! • Overview • Management • The P.A. • The Text • MS Formats • Mike Acting • Casting • Stereo • Directing • Production • Foley • Appendices • Author's Bio •  NATF home page