ADR & Foley: the goal is seamless sound

Post, June, 2005 by David John Farinella

The Foley team at Universal, which also includes Foley artist Gary Marullo and Foley mixer Albert Romero, has seen an up-tick in Foley detail in television thanks to both HD broadcasting and 5.1 surround systems in viewers' homes. "It's become more critical," says Minnerly. "The detail has to be there and it has to be that much more exacting. It requires considerably more time, but realistically, if you're going to have that clear a picture you're going to have a clear determination of what you're seeing in the picture, which means the sound has to be that exacting."

"If they see something that's in the background, they'll want to hear that now," adds Romero. "In the old days when you had little four-inch speakers you wouldn't even consider hearing anything like that."

Much of the Foley recorded on their stage goes through a Neumann KMR 81 and Romero records it directly to a TAS-CAM MMR 8. "Pretty much all our stuff is going to be raw," Minnerly reports. "We do very little to our tracks; maybe we use a compressor, but that's just to keep from clipping the signal before it goes to the dub stage."

According to Romero, the biggest challenge the team faces during a session is not synching up sounds. "I think the main problem that we have is trying to read the mind of the producers, the directors and the sound effects editors," he says, "to come up with sounds that don't really exist, and we have to create something that we think is going to be what they want.

"We had one project with a caterpillar on a leaf at about 100 yards and the director wanted to hear the feet of it. They don't even have feet, but they were real specific with what they wanted and we really had to work at it. It was really hard because we had to find something that they actually wanted to use and something that was in their brain that they couldn't describe." They got the sound, Marullo explains, by rubbing various fabrics against different surfaces.

THE SOUND OF WAX

Danetracks' (www.danetracks.com) supervising sound editor Richard Adrian knows all about creating sounds for things that are beyond comprehension. Take, for instance, his recent work on the feature film House of Wax, where he had to come up with what it sounds like to walk on dry wax and then what it sounds like to run through a burning, melting house of wax. "It was pretty intensive Foley work," he says. "We basically tried as many things as we possibly could. Some of it is actually wax. I bought about 80 pounds of different types of wax for the movie."

Foley artists, walking on 10-pound boxes of wax, created the dry wax sounds, and to get the melting wax house sounds, Adrian says, "pretty much everything was fair game as long as it didn't sound like water. There are lots of tricks I used on the Foley stage, and then I combined that with stuff that I had created in-house of people pulling their way through the wax. It was interesting that on the final stage they didn't want the wax to sound too wet. Fortunately we had enough different sounding material that that wasn't a problem at all."