Sound design Technique: Extreme audio focus

Most of the time as sound designers our best work is often the work that goes unnoticed. A quote from a previous instructor I had was “ if no one talks about the sound then you did your job”.  Although this may be true its not always the case. In some instances there may be a scene where the sound requires much more than just making it realistic. As explain in a previous post talking about the “sound of gravity” there should be no sound in space however with no sound it would be boring, so as a sound designer you need to understand that sometimes you need to create sounds that don’t exist.

One technique I like that is used in sound design can be compared to a close up in filming. If you want something or someone to be the focus of a shot you would go to a close up right? Well in sound design you can do the same, im not sure what its actually called but I call it a extreme audio focus.  A great example of this is in the film Amelie(2001 directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet) this is a French film if you do plan on watching it there will be subtitles. There’s a scene where she’s walking down a hall in a train station and the audio just zooms in onto her footsteps out of nowhere it really grabs the viewer’s attention, although this does go along with the movie’s style it is shown in an over saturated filter.

There is a bunch of examples of these in the filter where the sound designer focuses on a single sound, I think it really helps bring the viewers attention, it does however take you out of the film sometimes and you realize that It isn’t real but at the same time your drawn to it because it was such an interesting sound. I recommend anyone to watch this film. I really enjoyed it. It was also nominated for best sound in the Oscars in 2001.

The art of Foley: History and uses

Hey everyone this week I will be talking about the art of foley. For those of you who don’t know what foley is, it’s the reproduction of sound effects that are then added to the film, video or other types of motion picture.  These sounds can be as simple as footsteps walking on certain materials, to doors opening or the sound of sitting on a leather couch.

The term comes from Jack Donovan Foley who is considered the creator of foley art. He started in 1927, the way he did foley incorporated a team of people who would watch the film in real time and create the sounds of things happening like people walking or zipping up jackets and etc… They had to be perfect in time because it was happening on real time and they had to record on one track. His basic methods are still used today however the technology has improved so that you don’t have to do it live or on one track and if you’re late you can synch it back up using a DAW.

One of my favorite uses of foley comes from Disney; they had to create props or devices to create the sound effects of cartoons. For example if they needed to create thunder they had a huge sheet of metal and would hit it, which would cause this thundering sound. Another example would if they needed rain they had a cylinder looking prop that had nails on the inside and beans. When they would turn the cylinder the beans would come into contact with the nails creating the rain sound. There’s a video I will include at the end of this post that will go more into detail on this.

I think that foley creates a big part of sound design because it adds a touch of realism to the sounds that SFX banks cant produce. To be a foley artist you need to be pretty creative and think on your feet to figure what kinds of objects will give you that certain sound your looking for. Hopefully the video will inspire you to look more into Foley and decide to use that method instead of using a SFX bank. 

This is the link the disney portion starts midway through.

Foley video