I’ve never done any foley before and felt I should try to work on the We Need To Talk About Kevin clip before I start working on my own clip as a way of finding out problems and techniques before the real thing.
I brought Dan with me as we needed one person in the control room and one in the foley room. Since I knew Pro Tools more I ended up being in the control room. Although next time we will swap as I want to try doing foley art.
We started by watching the clip with the atmospheres I’ve added and just started writing down things we could do in synch. The main part that stood out was when she was lying down on the sofa and then gets up. The pills fall of the table puts her slippers on and then she breaks the doorknob opening the door.
I labelled up and marked the areas on the Pro Tools project that we wanted to record and then got dan in the foley room.
We used a Sennheiser MKH 416-P48U3 shotgun mic for the close-up footsteps sounds we wanted to record. I chose this mic as the last time I used the 418, which is stereo. But in this instance, we didn’t need that. The polar pattern on the 416 microphones is perfect for the subtle effects we wanted to record. The polar pattern is hyper-cardioid which means it will only really record what’s in front of it which makes it perfect for what we were doing that day.
We also set up an XY recording stereo setup in the room for a test but I found it wasn’t that useful. The shotgun held up better for the subtle movements. Maybe I should try to use the condensers for a more close up recording than to record the room and compare it with the 416.
We set up the 416 on a short mic stand pointed towards the wooden floor for the recording. About 10-20cm away from the source. I synched up the tv’s in the foley and room and set up the talkback so I and Dan could communicate.
I then got him to do some random effects to get a signal so I could create the gain structure in the interface and make sure everything was going into pro tools correctly. I then put the video on a loop and let him practice the foley of the steps and let him attempt it a few times. Then counted him in and recorded.
We did a few more foley recordings such as the pills dropping from the table and the door being pulled which I think ended up really good and almost perfectly in synch.
We did try to do more but ran out of time as we spent an initial hour and a bit setting up. There were two main things I learnt during this session. Number one was the gain structure was hard to balance and keep where I wanted it to be. When you crank the gain as high as you do when recording foley as you need every subtle detail if the foley artist speaks or does something louder there is less ceiling as we are in the extreme gain territory. So it clips very easily. I need to practice more foley to get this gain structure how I want it to be. The second thing was the sounds. We tried to make the tomato being thrown sound with dan filling up a bowl with water and moving his hands in it but it didn’t really work so we left it. Even though we used a lot of the props in the room we should have perhaps watched the video before we went in and thought of some props to bring. Properly plan more than planning when we arrived as the time is limited.