Ever watched a silent movie? Not Netflix on mute….a black and white epic that predates recorded sound. We’ve seen such a movie. And while we appreciate the effort and ingenuity required to create films back in the day, by today’s standards they’re pretty boring. We’re spoiled with rich soundscapes, orchestras and explosions. Everything we watch is an auditory extravaganza. Exciting sound is so mandatory that we don’t even notice it’s there. So what happened between then and now? Jack Foley happened.

With the advent of audio recording equipment came the inevitable inclusion of music into film, and with that, the ability to record dialogue and sound effects.

Footsteps, rustling clothing, turning on a light, opening or closing a door, putting a book on a table, car horns in the distance. All of these actions are integral to the scene but too quiet or subtle to capture with the microphones used to record the dialogue during a scene.

These sounds would be recorded separately after filming and added later and with the limited editing capabilities of tape recorders at the time, adding these additional effects convincingly was a challenge.

 Cue Jack Foley.

Foley pioneered the artform of performing sound effects.

In order to accurately recreate the specific sounds of every scene, Foley would ‘become’ the character/s, imitating their movements in a purpose-built space full of directional microphones and inanimate objects, often recording all the sounds in a single take on a single track.

Picture this: Foley is standing in a sandpit full of dirt and stones in a recording studio, holding multiple wooden canes wrapped in loose cloth, each with a different shoe on attached to the end. Like a master puppeteer, Foley is mimicking the walking cadence of several characters simultaneously, thudding and grinding the shoes in harmony with the on-screen visuals.  

Just another day in the office.

If there were too many effects to record alone, Foley would enlist the help of prop men to silently swap out the props in real-time, or become the conductor of his own rustling, scratching, door slamming orchestra. If a character had a limp, Foley would record his footsteps with a rock uncomfortably lodged in his shoe. If a staircase needed to creak at exactly the right moment, Foley would lean back in his old wooden rocking chair. With recording expenses and man power at a premium, he would achieve better results in a single track than others would achieve in 20.

Cut to the modern day, the immediacy and portability of capturing and synthesizing your own high-quality sounds has changed the game significantly. It costs next to nothing to record one hundred takes of a door slamming in your bedroom on a budget home recording setup that still sounds infinitely better than the technology available in the 50’s and 60’s.

At Spacist Productions, we adopt a hybrid approach to capturing and creating sounds both out in the world or at our fully equipped recording studio, using cutting edge techniques while embodying the creativity and resourcefulness of early pioneers like Jack Foley.

If you’d like to explore some audio ideas in an upcoming project, feel free to get in touch.

Talk soon!