The early days of Hollywood saw plucky foley pioneers save audiences from a lifetime of boring sound design and create an art form which continues to draw admiration and fascination to this very day.
The history of art interfacing with technology often sees an ascending platform ‘borrow’ from the medium it is eclipsing. With its veer towards bundling and advertising, streaming these days increasingly resembles the cable TV packages that it sought to render redundant. Likewise, video games continue to lean into the cinematic styles and narrative conventions of film, even as the industry outpaces the movies in earnings. The same was true of cinema as it blossomed as a narrative art form in the wake of 1927’s The Jazz Singer, which introduced synchronised sound for the first time.
Until the advent of synchronised sound allowed filmmakers to create more narratively complex tales, it was that other upstart technology – radio – that stood alone as the western world’s technological cutting-edge medium for fictional drama. However, as Hollywood embraced sound, it also quickly appropriated the techniques used by radio dramas in order to boost the sonic profile of its films, making a trip to the movies a feast for the ears, as well as the eyes.
One such technique was the art of sound reproduction, a dramatic device that radio shows had been using for several years to add a dash of auditory drama to their productions. These crafty methods of duplicating real-world background noise within a cramped recording studio had already laid the foundations for the ingenious creativity that would eventually become foley work. Electric fans in metal bathtubs have been known to double for car engines, whilst actors often spoke into boxes to create the impression they were speaking from another room entirely. Sometimes, the creation of domestic ambience would be as straightforward as sloshing plates in water to recreate the sound of dishes being washed.
However, unlike radio, film productions featured actors actually performing these sound-emitting feats rather than sonically recreating them. Actors couldn’t use coconuts to simulate the sounds of riding a horse – they were too busy actually riding the horse (or at the very least, their stunt double was doing it for them). Yet still these canny sound designers found themselves being tempted away from work on the airwaves and apply their skills to the medium of film.
Up and running
So why the need to bring in additional personnel to recreate those sounds? Well, as Dann Cahn – a seasoned Hollywood editor – would recall to Television Academy: the microphones weren’t sensitive enough to pick up footsteps or hand movements or picking up a glass. Microphones on set would only pick up dialogue.
However, rather than a substandard ‘talkie’, it would be the 1929 production of Show Boat that spurred studios into the use of foley sounds – a process kick-started by Universal Studios when it realised that its upcoming ‘silent musical’ was probably going to seem somewhat dated upon release. Audiences in the dawning age of the talkies were now expecting their musicals to come with, well, music, and The Jazz Singer had set the standard more than two years prior. So the sounds had best match up with the action on screen.
To add sound to its silent film, Universal put together a team which included Jack Foley, the sound designer after whom the process is named. Foley penned his thoughts on the process in his regular column for Universal’s internal newspaper and, like most things that spawned from that new frontier age of filmmaking, his thoughts were unvarnished: “Faces around here were so red,” Foley wrote, “someone yelled, ‘are we still in business?’”
Whilst Warner Bros was sitting pretty with its now-established proprietary Vitaphone sound recording tech, Foley and the Universal team were using an unfamiliar loaned device to muddle their way through the transition to the talkies, figuring out how to turn Show Boat from a silent musical into one with sound.
Although the end result would be largely ignored by cinemagoers, some of the techniques employed on that production would form the foundation of ‘foley work’ as we know it ‘- with Jack Foley and his team projecting the silent film onto a screen and devising a host of ways to replicate the missing sounds and recording them in sync with the picture.
Here to stay
And so, a doomed gambit to save a lost cause spawned a whole new branch of cinematic artistry. Foley artists, named to honour Jack Foley’s trailblazing style, became a staple of the filmmaking community. However, as microphones improved, you might imagine that the fledgling art of foley would have died out. After all, Hollywood studios are notorious for finding ways to squeeze a film’s budget, so why splurge extra dollars on a process that recreates an asset that you already have?
The answer to that lies in a wider critical debate that was engulfing film in first half of the 20th century, that being the delicate balance between realism and expressionism. Whilst big-brained film critics like André Bazin were arguing about the merits of cinema’s grander purpose as a tool for realism or pure expressionism, the debate over sound design was all but settled. A couple of decades of being exposed to foley sounds had conditioned audiences to expect more expressive sounds, with realism relegated to the status of a supporting player.
After all, the scraping sound as Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone unsheathe their blades in 1935’s Captain Blood may bear little resemblance to reality (scabbards were often lined with soft material to prevent blade-dulling scraping), but it certainly gets the blood pumping as the two Hollywood icons prepare to duel.
The expressive nature of foley sound had become invaluable to the cinematic experience as a whole, adding to the images emblazoning the screen to create that magical movie feel. “By means of some mysterious perceptual alchemy,” as the legendary sound editor Walter Murch once put it, “whatever virtues sound brings to film are largely perceived and appreciated by the audience in visual terms. The better the sound, the better the image.”
Following footsteps
The following decades would further prove that foley was indeed considered as Ôbetter sound’ and the art form would develop in its performance, texturing and inventiveness. Even recording a sound as commonplace as footsteps becomes a very serious matter in the hands of a foley artist.
In her excellent book, The Foley Grail: The Art Of Performing Sound For Film, Games, And Animation, Vanessa Theme Ament discusses the art of recording footsteps on no less than 62 separate occasions, including reviewing how foley footsteps have evolved over the decades, and morphed in style to reflect audience expectations.
“The style of footsteps is striking by today’s cinematic standards,” she writes, reflecting on foley work she has analysed from decades past. “There was an artificiality to the track that was totally acceptable to the taste and genre of the 1950s.”
The 1977 film Cabaret offers one great example of how foley footsteps can subtly enhance the creative purpose of a sequence, all without an audience ever realising how such ambient sound can be quietly rewiring their understanding of a sequence. As Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey perform their live version of Money on a Berlin stage, the film’s sound design adds in the barely audible sound of footsteps as the duo move across the stage.
These aren’t the prominent kind of footsteps that you’d hear foregrounded in a Fred Astaire tap routine, rather a feature that’s layered within the sequence’s wider sound design so that at some points, you can barely hear it over the vocals, the music and the ambient sound of the audience.
However, in combination with wide shots that show the back of the audience’s heads and the occasional passing waitress briefly blocking the foreground of the frame, it contributes to a subconsciously tactile tone that places the audience right there in the scene.
The foley artist on Cabaret isn’t credited in the film’s end titles (a credit simply titled ‘sound’ goes to David Hildyard, a sound mixer of that era). As such, the artist that would have had to deftly and painstakingly retrace Minnelli and Grey’s steps across the stage has been lost to time. That seems to be the lot of the foley artist, though: an unsung member of any film production whose work, when done well, renders them invisible.
An alien tumult
Sometimes though, foley artists are faced with what seems like the impossible: create a sound that doesn’t exist and fit it within a world of sounds that do. It’s a pickle that Ament considers in The Foley Grail when she notes how many directors demand ‘sound that has never been heard before’ to set their films apart. In 1987’s Predator, Ament found herself performing the footsteps of the alien hunter without knowing what the creature looked like, initially taking her cues from a leotard-clad actor in the footage she was sent.
Eventually, Ament’s litheness of performance was mixed with a heavier sound to create the impression of power and gracefulness that the creature possessed, the combination of real performance serving to root sound design in reality. It’s an approach that David Stone, Predator’s supervising sound effects editor tried to incorporate with the film’s wider mix: the creature’s signature shoulder-mounted plasma cannon used manufactured effects for the alien weapon, but Stone still found himself rooting it through the use of Ament’s foley work.
“It had to sound like it was moved by magic,” he explained. “So on the far-away shots we just used John Pospisil’s [designed effects] work. But in the close-ups, we combined it with foley because it needed more specific actions. My inclination is to use foley to anchor things like that in reality.”
It all makes sense, though. The film’s punches are the most visceral sounds in an impeccably designed soundscape, but when you consider that these brawls are the only things that make the film’s characters feel alive, the foley artistry underscores that idea completely. Likewise, 1988’s Die Hard found Vanessa Theme Ament having to perform the bare-footed footsteps of the film’s hero, John McClane, “with more weight and emphasis than if I had a shoe on.”
Ament and fellow foley artist Robin Harlan auditioned many pairs of shoes for Hans Gruber, the film’s antagonist, noting that they finally “selected a gorgeous. sounding pair of shoes that had a rich and authoritarian sound. [Gruber] was the boss of the whole operation, and he needed to sound ‘in charge’.”
As with Fight Club, these carefully performed contrasting sounds do more than just distinguish the two characters’ manner of walking. They emphasise the power dynamic between them, raising the narrative stakes and establishing each character’s archetype: the desperate, unprepared hero facing off against the slick and cunning villain. Every foley artist knows that footsteps are never just footsteps. It’s why so many of them have a whole room full of different shoes for every possible occasion.
Sound progress?
Whilst the origins of foley work may have been rooted in the wild days of early Hollywood inventiveness, the cold algorithms of machine learning could well play a part in the art form’s future. Whilst no machine is able to create with the same ingenuity as a human foley artist, machine learning could speed up many of the processes that underpin their work. Several studies have shown over the past few years that humans can struggle to tell the difference between a foley sound created by a human and one that is created by a computer ‘- and various pieces of software are now available to ease the process of syncing sound.
However, would a computer figure out that you can replicate the sound of a giant boulder tumbling after a fleeing archaeologist by rolling a car down a hill without the motor running? We don’t think so. Could a machine decide to mix the movement of packaged liver with jelly and popcorn to create the song of E.T. moving? Again, that’s likely a no. As long as human inventiveness isn’t superseded by machines, there’s always going to be a need for the foley artists and their many, many pairs of shoes.
