Point & Click of No Return - Foley Session 1
On our first foley session for the Point & Click of No Return Adam Higginson (head of foley) arrived with some of the actual props from the film and he also brought an array of bits and pieces to emulate the sounds you see on screen, he had the asset list printed out and was organised and ready to go.
We thought we’d start with the footsteps but that was not to be. First of all the TV was making an obnoxious humming sound which was coming in almost as loud as the footsteps. We turned the TV off and tried to just get a few footsteps down with the intention of nudging them into place, but the thing is the C24 room is not really soundproof. So every time we hit record, people would walk down the hall laughing or someone would walk around upstairs in clicky shoes. This made it very difficult to get a clear take of Adams bare feet. We decided that recording some of the phone sounds would be quick and easy. So we recorded the phone ringing on a wooden table through a condenser mic to capture the sound of the phone vibrating and resonating through the wood, we also recorded the phone in his hand for the different tone when he picks it up. Later in the film, there was a scene where he has the phone to his ear so we plugged the phone into the interface with an adapter and recorded the clean signal of the phone ringing straight into the door, along with the answering message.
We went on a break and rethought our next move, we decided it was best to record the props we had here; the cigarette case, zippo lighter & metal tray covered in utensils. We also discussed the idea of using a Vape for the cigarette inhales.
So we headed on down to the faithful C24 studio and prayed that people would stop making noise. We then recorded the metal tray crashes because they were louder and we wouldn't have to gain the mic up so much. We set up the medical tray with all the utensils on it and recorded the impact sounds in time with the video, we set up another tray that had a lower tone to it and recorded another layer to the impact sounds which made it sound nice and full. We also recorded some inhale sounds with a vape, we then took the lid off and turned it on just enough to make a sizzling sound for the burns. We then moved onto recreating the cigarette case and zippo lighter sounds. This was all relatively simple, open and close cigarette case, open zippo, light it, close it. We took a few takes and layered them up it sounded pretty good. We recorded a slap on the face by slapping the face and found it didn’t really work so we instead hit a leather chair which seemed to do the trick.
After a fairly productive session, we spent a bit of time fine tuning the new sounds we had in the session. We were excited to hear share what we’d done with the rest of the team at the next session although when that came to pass, they were happy with just over half the sounds, but not so happy with the other half. This may be a case of re-recording or just a case of fine-tuning. Either way, we still have a lot of work ahead of us.
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