Take 10 Extended Interviews

TAKE 10, POV BOX: FOLEY ARTISTS

FULL INTERVIEW: ANDY MALCOLM AND DON WHITE

After hearing from the dialogue editor in the last chapter, let’s have a listen to two people involved in that other component of the film soundtrack, sound effects. The close relation between music and sound effects becomes obvious in the work of the Foley artist. Responsible for the production of human-made sounds ranging from footsteps to kissing, the Foley artist recreates these sounds during the post-production phase of a film, usually working separately from those working on dialogue and music. The name “Foley” comes from the original sound-effect-dedicated person in Hollywood, a man by the name of Jack Foley (1891-1967). Working on post-production sound at a time when the talkies were just starting, Foley discovered that unusual methods are often required to arrive at apparently simple sounds like creaks or footsteps. The Foley artists interviewed here, Andy Malcolm and Don White, both began working in the film industry in the early 1970s before founding Footsteps Studios just outside Toronto, Canada. They have worked on some of Hollywood’s biggest hits, including Bridesmaids (2011) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). I spoke to them in their studio while they were taking a break from their work.

JH: Thank you both for agreeing to this interview.

AM: It’s a good thing you’re recording this rather than us having to write it all out.

DW: Recording, which is something that we do all day!

JH: Speaking of recording, let’s start with a basic question related to the recording of the film soundtrack. Tell me, what’s the difference between Foley sound and sound effects? Is there a difference?

DW: Yes, absolutely. A door closes, a car engine runs, these are sound effects, mechanical things. Anything that a human being touches or walks on, any human related sound, that’s Foley sound. All your knives and forks and your shoes and your drawer opens, and your glass downs, and your pipe smokes and your hats on and your whatever else, that’s what we do at Foley sound.

AM: Right. A lot of times, though, there is overlap between Foley and effects. For example, for a car crash, they will have a pre-recorded sound from a library of two cars crashing. Or, a lot of times, we’ll do parts of gun sounds, the gun handling, all the loading, all the caulking. But the sound effects will do the gunshots—just so we’re not shooting off guns in a studio!

JH: What determines the division of labor between Foley and effects, then? It seems kind of arbitrary.

AM: Well, if you think about gun sounds, it’s not so arbitrary. If the actor is caulking a lever action rifle or something, you can do the Arnold Schwarzenegger “cha-ching” sound or something else. That’s a very human thing. But the gunshot itself is not human.

JH: So, Foley sounds are human sounds.

AM: That’s right. We do body sounds, for example. We’ll do a lot of vocal sounds, a lot of kissing or grunting. Also drinking, sneezing, coughing sounds, all that stuff, or taking a puff on a cigarette.

JH: But you don’t do the main dialogue of the film.

AM: That’s right. We will do some vocal sounds. If someone gets stabbed, for example, we’d do “uh!” that kind of a thing, but other than that, the dialogue is added later. Because on the initial soundtrack that we get, it’s just chaos. The first AD (assistant director) is shouting out directions, “OK, the second plank, you come in now!” Everyone on set knows it’s all done after the fact. They’ll have loop groups, they call them. If there’s a scene taking place in a restaurant, they’ll have all the background actors mouthing conversations. They’re not really talking, because you have to focus on dialogue, that’s what is most important. Then they come in and do what they call rhubarb tracks, rhubarb, rhubarb…

JH: Rhubarb? Oh, I see! It’s just nonsense, “rhubarb, rhubarb.”

AM: Yeah. Again, one of the things that every film requires now is what they call a foreign version track. It used to be called an M&E track, music and effects track, but now they call it the foreign version track. It means that you provide foreign countries a completed track with music and sound effects only, no dialogue. Even where we have a sequence where someone was talking and you could hear what was going on—they’re drinking a cup of tea, or whatever—and it was good on the guide track, then we would still do it over if they’re talking over it. If it was recorded cleanly, you can probably leave it, but as soon as someone is talking over it, we know we have to redo that because we have to provide a track with no intelligible dialogue.

JH: I want to try to get an idea of how you work on a project. Let’s take Bladerunner 2049 (2017), for which your studio did the Foley. Andy, by the time you were done with the Foley sound on that film, how long after you were done did the film come out? A year or so?

AM: No, in that case we finished very close to release time. That happens. For Hostiles (2017), for example, which we did and it was released almost a year after we were done. You never know. At other times, you’re up against the wall; we finish mixing, and it comes out weeks later!

JH: And Bladerunner 2049?

AM: We probably finished up three months before that film came out.

JH: That seems like a short period of time.

AM: Yeah, on a big budget film. There’s such a difference between a big budget and a low budget film. With Bladerunner, we got to experiment, to play around. And it’s always more enjoyable when you can come up with new things, take the time to come up with new things. Otherwise, you just cover what you need to cover and that’s it.

JH: Andy, at what stage do you get the film? Director’s cut, probably?

AM: Hopefully! But often not. Often, there are stages. There’s an assembly cut and then there is a rough cut and then the final one is called the final cut. Foley comes in somewhere between a rough cut and a fine cut. It’ll depend on the director, too. Some are really precise like David Cronenberg; with him, once the film is cut, it’s cut and that’s it. On the other hand, take Tim Burton. When we did Alice in Wonderland (2010), I think we worked with over seventy versions, because of the animation process in that film. I remember doing this one walk, Johnny Depp’s walking and Alice is on his shoulder, and he’s walking through the woods and we did the footsteps for that. Then next day we get another cut and there’s leaves falling out of the tree, and he’s kicking the leaves as he walks...

JH: The same scene?

AM: The same shot. So, we had to change the footsteps completely. Lots of changes on that film. Thankfully, on these big budget films, we work with the supervising editor who is a big help.

JH: Supervising sound editor? That person will oversee music as well, so all sound?

AM: The supervising sound editor will work with the composer, but the two are separate jobs. The supervising sound editor oversees all the sound: sound effects, Foley, dialogue and music.

DW: Andy’s right. The supervising editor’s job is to try to minimize last minute changes. That’s hard sometimes, because on a lot of big budget films, we have to go back and change stuff many, many times. But you try not to do that because it costs money.

JH: When you’re working on Foley, you have some version of the main dialogue, but not the finished dialogue?

DW: Yes, we’re given temp dialogue tracks. They’re called the guide tracks. These tracks have notes for ADR, Automated Dialogue Replacement, to be added later.

AM: Also, the supervising sound editor will help us work through scenes, skipping some and doing this or that work on others.

JH: You do Foley sound in layers?

AM: Oh yes! Actually, we’ve often got some sixty tracks going, which means we’re going over the same sequence sixty different times. And every time, you’re adding something new. You start with footsteps, you do all the characters’ feet, and you isolate all the main characters. Then you do groups. You might have twelve, fourteen tracks of just feet, and then during a battle you’ve got all the sword clangs, the sword scrapes, you’ve got punches, and you’ve got shields, you’ve got arrows, fire and whatever else is going on, and you keep building and building.

JH: So roughly how much time does an entire film take for Foley? Let’s say Bladerunner 2049, how long did the Foley on that take you?

AM: Bladerunner took thirty days. On a normal film we get between ten to fifteen days. Usually we start with the footsteps, and go through different sounds after that. The last thing that we do is what we call the movement or cloth track. By the way, when it comes to dialogue, often the actors have to come back to re-voice certain scenes. This happens a lot, probably thirty to forty percent of every film soundtrack requires re-voicing, ADR.

JH: That’s not done in your Foley studio?

AM: No, no. That happens elsewhere. When the actors are doing that, they’re basically standing at a podium, and the director is usually in the room calling the emotion or the take, as well as the supervising sound editor or the dialogue editor is there calling sync.

JH: Let’s talk about music a bit, if you don’t mind, gentlemen, since that’s my area of interest. What are the sounds that you would create that are most musical, would you say? Do you use bells, for example?

AM: Oh yeah, we have every kind of bell you can think of! We do lots of bells, whistles. But, speaking of music, for me Foley is all kind of musical. As simple as thing as putting down a glass, that sound needs to be made three dimensional, musical.

JH: Your speaking of all film sound as music makes me think of Robert Altman, who was very innovative in this respect. Altman had a reputation in seventies and eighties for live multi-track sound.

AM: He was, he was one of the first to really experiment with this. We actually worked on a documentary that Ron Mann did, called Altman (2014). It’s a trip through Altman’s film career, and how he met his wife and all that, but it also talks about the layering of dialogue that he does. He would have multiple mics, he would have Lavalier mics on all the actors, boom mics, and then he’d take it and fudge it all later. I mean, that’s what we’re doing in Foley, it’s the same thing as composing music. It’s layers and layers of tracks.

JH: So, when does the actual musical score get put in with respect to your work? How does the timing of all this work?

DW: A lot of times, all of the different parts of the soundtrack, Foley sound, the sound effects, on ADR and on music simultaneously,

AM: That’s right. They’re happening simultaneously.

DW: Although traditionally, music is a little later into the process. Music has got to fit the picture a lot more closely. But dialogue, effects, and Foley try to work as simultaneously as possible so that we’re all on the same wave length. Here at Foley we are generally slightly behind dialogue and sound effects. They get a head start on us. They start piecing it together and then they can see what Foley needs to do. Some sound editors will get us to do more stuff than others. It depends on the project.

JH: So, to use Bladerunner 2049 as an example again, you’re never going to hear the Hans Zimmer score until—

AM: We don’t hear it until the final version comes out in theaters! Some of our work may not be in that final version. We do everything we do as Foley artists, and we do it whether they use it or not. That’s decided in the final mixdown.

JH: And generally speaking, how much of what you make is used in the final version?

AM: Again, it depends on the movie and the director. In a movie like Bladerunner, I would say that just about eighty percent of everything we did was used.

JH: Is it ever hundred percent?

AM: Sometimes all of our Foley is used. Animation is totally different from live action in terms of Foley and sound effect editing.

JH: How so?

AM: Because everybody knows that animation is not real. There’s a suspended disbelief when it comes to animation. So, we at Foley get to go off the deep end a little bit with animation! Practically anything goes if it works with the picture. Live-action comedy is somewhere in the middle because you want to make it funny, so you exaggerate. Like Austin Powers peeing for two minutes. You know it’s not real, but it does have to sound like real pee.

JH: This is something that you did? Austin Powers peeing for two minutes?

AM: Yeah.

JH: Which film was this?

AM: Gold Member (2002). Those kinds of jobs are fun! And then there are musicals, like The Greatest Showman (2017) which we did, where have to do all the real scenes transparently, especially the dancing. It’s a percussion track, basically. And you have to relate Foley to music. But, like I said, Foley is all kind of musical. Even something as simple as clinking two wine glasses together. I’ll try six different glasses, and the one that’s the most musical, that’s the one I’ll use. It has to have the right sound. Even footsteps, those need to have some musicality, some emotion to them. The real art of Foley is getting the emotion of the character.

JH: Can you talk a little about microphone placement? How do you mic’ things?

AM: We try not to record with the microphone too close to objects. One of the other things that we did way back when was we started, to make the Foley sound real, was to go out and record location Foley. We would take all our gear, a mixing board and microphones, wireless headphones, the whole bit.

JH: That’s mentioned on your website.

AM: Location Foley is a lot of work. The first film we did as a Foley studio, as Footsteps Studio, was Agnes of God (1985). Before that, we’d been working for other companies. We did a lot of Agnes of God on location. We just went back to the original locations where they shot the film. Location Foley is amazing because of the realism.

JH: Location Foley or recording Foley sounds from scratch is tedious, sounds like. But it also sounds like it’s superior to cutting and pasting sounds from a sound library!

AM: It is a lot of work, yes. Take car sounds, for example. When we do car Foley, we actually bring cars into the studio. The thing about Foley, what we’re trying to do is make it transparent. If you hear Foley and it sounds like Foley, you didn’t do a very good job. It has to be totally transparent. Everybody thinks that all film sound is recorded on set or on location, unless you’re in the business. To give another example, a movie that’s shot in the winter, by the time it’s edited we’re getting into the summer, so we have to be able to make snow in the summer. The same thing in the winter, with all the snow on the ground, we’ll use cassette tape for grass, we use heavy bags for body falls. We turn bicycles upside down to simulate the tire on the surface, all the rattles. We just did an IMAX Panda film, Pandas (2018), and I actually bought some plants to use, because you don’t want to be using dead-sounding leaves to simulate their environment. When the pandas are crashing through the forest for example, we rustle these, so it sounds live.

DW: Andy’s right. The key to good Foley is recording the sounds for that film. Also correct placement of the microphone. Mic’ing things too closely doesn’t give sounds the room ambiance. Some people think we're putting rooms on the Foley, but we’re not!

JH: Rooms?

DW: Yes, it’s a term for an echo reverb effect. Early on, we went to mic’ing from a little further out for the sound to have some detail, to catch the natural reverb of the room or space, so they wouldn’t have to add lots of reverb later.

JH: So, just to be clear, most of the sound that I hear in a high-end production, a Hollywood blockbuster, from a plate clinking to footsteps, that’s all added in during postproduction by Foley artists such as yourselves?

DW: Absolutely. Our process is to create each sound from scratch as we go through a scene. In other cases, to speed things up, a Foley artist will pick out sounds from a sound library and insert them. But really, it’s so much faster and better to get a human being to do it. When our Foley artists here at the studio do footsteps, for example, they shape their performance to fit what’s going on in the screen. You don’t get that when you’re editing from sound libraries.

JH: Which would be automated Foley...

DW: Right. Sounds from a library or the Internet, stored away over the years. In fact, that’s why Jack Foley started doing his own sounds, because he didn’t like those taken from the film studio’s library. Obviously, in his day, he didn’t have our recording equipment.

AM: Don is right. In the very early days of film sound, they would have six or seven sound artists to record at the same time. There was no re-recording. They would rehearse it first, this guy doing the tea cups and the glasses, and another guy doing footsteps, and another guy doing the thunder sheet or whatever.

DW: When Andy and I started out in the early 1970s, you could re-record. We were using magnetic tape. After you recorded, you had to rewind the tape to check if everything was right.

JH: And then came Dolby, with Star Wars (1977).

DW: That’s right, with noise reduction and stuff. That’s right, I’d forgotten that! The first stereo Foley that we did, our first Dolby stereo job was City on Fire (1979), I think.

AM: The other thing about analog as opposed to digital, is that all the tracks are interlocked. In those days we were using three-track magnetic tape. You could record several times, but you couldn't move a sound effect. So, if you did a perfect sound of a punch, and it was two frames out of sync, you would have to do it over again. Whereas now with digital recording, you can just move it. Then it went from three tracks to six, to twenty-four tracks. Twenty-four tracks and you can't move anything!

DW: Which was worse! If there was a pop on the track, the mixer would actually come up to the machine, get out a razor blade, and scrape the magnetic tape trying to get the pop without ruining everything else.

JH: You were dealing with tape up until when?

DW: I would say that was the mid 1990s. But the early digital sound was noisy, the converters were really noisy. There was that whole period during the changeover to digital where the film industry thought it was getting better, but actually for us on the battlefield doing the work, we had less and less tools to work with and yet they were expecting more from us. But then came Pro Tools and digital sound. Woah! That would have been in the mid 1990s. I think that Only You (1994) was the first one I did in digital.

JH: The mid-nineties? Why so late? In music, with synthesizers, digital sound started at least a decade earlier.

DW: Remember, we’re talking about the film industry. The film industry does not move fast because there’s so much money invested in all the machinery. You had to prove that something was worth their while changing, right? The same for using computers in the early days. This is still a problem now. Pro Tools is updating to a new version every one or two years, and that’s expensive.

AM: When we first started with digital sound, around the year 2000, we had three systems. There was Fairlight, there was Cubase or something like it, and then there was Pro Tools. Some other sound companies were using Synclaviers. We chose Pro Tools, and that turned well in the long run. And now Pro Tools is the industry standard.

DW: They stumbled a couple of times, but overall, they did pretty good.

JH: Pro Tools will remain the standard for the foreseeable future, you think?

DW: God knows! We thought Dolby was going to last forever, and now they’re redundant. Why do you think they came up with Dolby Atmos? It was so they could stay in the industry. You can be here today, gone tomorrow.

JH: Well, thank you both again for this interview!

AM: Glad to do it!

DW: Same here.