As you may or may know, the art of foley has its roots not in a post-production facility in some basement studio, but in live performance. Foley artists have all manner of contraptions - many of them homemade - to emulate all manner of sounds to provide audio illustration for films. (The craft actually has its roots in radio, a medium where sound is the only medium Elizabethan theatre, and they may have had predecessors in early Greek dramas — Thanks, gToon for the correction… see his comment below. In this century, foley work first became popular in radio dramas, and only took on the name of Jack Foley later when film hit full stride.)

Foley sound is used to enhance productions for films and television. In fact, almost none of the sounds you hear in the final edit of the movie were likely captured during filming.

Machinima can be a bit different, as all videogames have some sort of sound effects which can be captured when the video is captured. The Sims 2 is particularly strong in the area of “foley” type sounds, most notably footsteps which change timbre depending on the time of surface on which the Sim is walking.

Many times, sound enthusiasts find the audio captured with the in-game footage is either too limiting (everything gets summed down to a fixed stereo mix), or inappropriate for the kind of environment they want to show.

BloodSpell is proving to be an interesting experience for me as the “sound guy,” as there is NO audio track from the filming. If you’ve ever played an RPG a la Neverwinter Nights, you know that this is probably a very good thing, as role-playing games tend to be heavy on ambient textures and fairly light on non-combat foley.

So, for the first time, I find myself neck deep in the digital age of foley work. Some sounds are still created from scratch, the old fashioned way, but for the most part the “placement” of the sounds is done in non-linear editing after the recording takes place.

But the exceptions to this have proven to be not only the most challenging, but also the most fun aspects of this production. Some sounds just NEED to be performed in order to catch the nuances of motion and behavior. A number of times I’ve had to stop recording because my wife is laughing at me while I’m noisily sweeping my arms backward and forward in a leather jacket, timing my motions to a leather-clad character on the video screen.

Footsteps have been another challenge. True foley artists have a prepared floor with various materials and quite a sizable collection of shoes, and they actually walk in time with the characters on screen - one at a time. That’s impractical for a home-based machinima sound guy. But I found a nice workaround that still let’s the footsteps be “performed” without me having to stomp around in boots on a hardwood floor. I simply captured a wide variety of footstep samples, and then filled up a VST drum machine with those samples and assigned them to keys on my MIDI controller… left foot on white keys, right foot on black. Then, after making the samples velocity-sensitive (i.e. the harder I press on the key, the louder the step sounds, and perhaps a slight variation in pitch too), I was able to perform footstep tracks without problem… though not without a bit of practice.

I used Native Instruments‘ Battery 2, but you can find freeware VST drum machines out there (BigBadaBom, for example)… you just need audio software that can make use of VSTs. A MIDI controller or keyboard is helpful, but not necessary… you can trigger the drum machine’s virtual “pads” with mouse-clicks if you had to.

It sounds like an awful lot of effort, I know… and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t sometimes agonizing. But you have to understand what we were (and are) going for in BloodSpell - a soundscape that rivals Hollywood films. You, the viewers, will ultimately be the judge of how well we (I) pulled it off.

Happy Easter, everyone. “Hey, look! Peter has candy!”

Want to learn more about foley? Check out:

• http://www.marblehead.net/foley/
• http://www.filmsound.org/foley/