Foley Frenzy

     SO. I have been assigned to do the sound part of the music video. So, what does this mean? I have to find all the sound effects needed for the project online, make some foley noises, and rerecord voice lines that are needed. I'm thinking of doing multiple takes of some of these sounds, so we would have plenty of resources to work with. However, today I'll just cover the foley chunks of the soundscape, and everything that happened with it!

Foley:

    Using foley in my work have always been fun for me, and I was given the chance to do that this time! I first had the sound effects I needed in the following list:  

- rec my Alice beginning voice line

- ⁠phone ringtone (marimba)

- ⁠re-record my “and how does it make you feel” line

- ⁠door opening and closing

- ⁠alarm clock sounds + ⁠clicking snooze button sound

- ⁠street noises (like birds and cars and stuff)

- ⁠footsteps (on tile and in concrete)

- ⁠wind sounds

- ⁠background music for therapists office

    I decided to do around half of the sound effects as foley, to make it easy to have the perfect sound needed in our project. But, I also wanted to make it somewhat easy for a foley rookie such as myself, so I stuck to the basic foley sounds I had already learned so far this year. This being the door sounds, alarm clock, footsteps, and wind. 

    For the door sounds, I went back to see what type of door was being opened in closed in the scene needed, and lucky me, it happened to be the same type of door I have at my house! If I'm being honest, I took the easy non-creative way out of this one and just recorded myself opening and closing my door. This may seem dumb, as that's exactly what happened in the scene. But this will emphasize the sound, and not just let it seem into the background noise. This will also make it easier to control the volume of the noise, since all the parts, like the original sound is, will not be all in one file.

     For the footsteps, I happened to have similar shoes (Converse) to what the main character was wearing (Doc Martins), which made it more realistic sounding rather than full of sneakers or crocs. I did two separate types of walking for each setting, which gave more variation to decide what sounds the best. One try I made the sounds just from the bare shoe, without wearing it. The second time I wore the shoes and walked in place. I ended up using the latter since it sounded and felt more realistic without having the empty feel. the shoe being somewhat muffled out because of my weight gave it a better sound.

These are two clips of me trying out each approach for the footsteps

    When doing the alarm clock, I just decided to do something similar as the door, use exactly what was in the video. Since I was the one who had brought the alarm clock on filming day, I had the exact sound it makes with good timing. I honestly just recorded that alarm for a few beeps, and then me shutting off the alarm with a simple click, just like I did in shooting.

    

For the wind, I saw this reddit post online discussing foley sounds for wind, and I found an interesting one I wanted to use. It said to take branches from outside with leaves on then and flow them across the microphone to get that natural wind. I did not like it at all. The mic sounded pretty staticky and distorted from the clunkiness of the leaves and was too distracting and out of place. I ended up just using a premade royalty free noise from pixabay.com to swap out the ratty sound.