This past Monday, September 22, Jen Ralston, a Foley sound artist, held a discussion on campus with communication students. A Foley artist is a member of a film or TV crew who to reproduces the natural, everyday sounds a human makes. Footsteps, kissing and punching are all recreated by Foley sound artists.
Jen has worked on a variety of media including film, television and video games. For nearly 13 years she has engineered the sound of over 60 productions including well known movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; The Big Lebowski, Frida, Bringing Out the Dead and TV shows such as The Wire and Generation Kill,to name a few.
Jen’s work is all post production and is meant to go unnoticed by viewers. The goal of all sound departments is to be ignored to the audience. When the sound is overlooked, that’s a job well done.
“People are able to accept jumps in picture more readily than jumps in sound. In daily life, you blink and move all the time, but sound never stops, so it takes a lot more work to smooth out the rough edges in a soundtrack than a picture track,” Jen elucidates to students.
A graduate of New York University’s Film School, Jen went into the sound field of production to avoid actors and actresses. Ironically, she works with them all the time. Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR) is just what it sounds like. Actors and actresses come into the sound studio and rerecord lines that didn’t turn out so well after filming commenced.
“A lot of actors feel they should be done with their jobs when they’re done shooting. Contractually, in the SAG contract, their job isn’t over until post production is done. They could be in France shooting a new movie and get a call that they have to come back to redo some lines in a movie they just wrapped up. I don’t usually see actors at their best,” she explains.
Sound departments, including Foley, usually cumulate a library of sounds for use in productions. Each studio has their own sound library. Some studios even pay for the use of each others copyrighted sounds. A lot of signature sounds you hear in modern day flicks date back to old feature films and cartoons. Many of the sounds you are hearing are actually rather far off from the real noise.
“A lot of Warner Brother’s cartoons use sounds from old western films. The Tasmanian devil, when he’s storming around, that’s actually a manipulated sound of a World War II airplane engine revving up,” Jen says. “The sound of a signature punch-in-the-face, that’s actually a bag of bricks being dropped to the ground.”
After being shown a scene from the movie Frida, it became more evident that a lot of what we hear onscreen is not at all what it seems. Jen told us that the sounds we heard in the Frida scene were all recorded in the closet of her apartment. It was intriguing to find out that she used household items like a cup of ice and yogurt to simulate sounds such as a gurney being pushed or a spurt of blood.
So, the next time you’re out at the cinema or watching your favorite TV show, take a second and thank the sound department for a job well done at making you completely oblivious to their work, for this is an A+ in their art of entertainment. |
