How the history of Foley can help your film

If you love movies, are a fan of science fiction or horror films, and have read anything about film production, you've probably seen a Foley reference somewhere. Maybe, when you hear the term Foley, you think of sound effects, you think of Foley artists, or, perhaps, if you're a bookworm, of Mr. Jack Donovan Foley. But if you are not familiar with it, nor with the man, this article is for you. Let's talk a little about Jack Donovan Foley, as well as his revolutionary technique in film history, which, for a long time, was almost indispensable to film production.

Jack Donovan Foley was born in New York in 1891 and died at the age of 76 in Los Angeles in 1967. This creative man wanted to focus his professional career on the development of new sound techniques for film. And the truth is that he succeeded. Foley was the pioneer of the technique that bears his name, and after having worked a good part of his life in sound effects, he was able to see how other artists were responsible for making it evolve. Jack Foley is today considered the father of sound effects in film. He was a pioneer in creating them with real sounds such as footsteps, rain, and clothing movements to introduce them in the middle of a film shoot. This was revolutionary right after the era of silent films.

Foley effects were created in real-time and with everyday elements. The idea developed from the radio soap operas that were heard in the United States and around the world during the 1930s, which required the creation of a series of sound effects to accompany the narration and dialogue of the voice actors. However, the history of sound effects is as old as narrative art itself. In ancient Greece, plays had a sophisticated system for echoing and sound channeling produced by the actors' masks and the very architecture of amphitheaters. But it was cinema that ultimately took these effects to another level.

A simple example: to emulate the sound of footsteps on dry leaves, a Foley artist steps on an old, tangled roll of film that was previously unrolled, crumpled, and left on the ground, as follows:

In this way, real-time creation allowed for greater synchronization with the recorded events. Jack Foley's sound effects were used mainly in the early years of film history, and, as we said, they were so innovative. Nowadays, they have fallen more into disuse due to the creation of extensive sound effects libraries, but the art of making Foley effects is still appreciated. We are talking about an art that has not died yet, and many people enjoy participating in these creations. It is almost a craft, an anchor that connects us with the inherent storytelling of our species. It takes great creativity and observation of sounds to create sounds better than those of real life.

It took a few years before the use of Foley effects in international films became standardized. According to several studies on Jack Foley's career, the first would be The Phantom of the Opera in 1925, although some experts consider The Jazz Singer, from 1927, to be the first Hollywood sound film.

Silent films used to have subtitles and substantial background musical accompaniment. The soundtrack may have deafened Jack Foley's effects, but it worked to make them easily discernible. It is said that the film Spartacus was one of the most attention-grabbing films of its year because of its use of sound effects - in fact, this film directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring the legendary Kirk Douglas won a Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing, a Golden Globe Award for Best Soundtrack, and was an Oscar nominee for both Best Editing and Best Soundtrack (although it won four Oscars for other reasons).

So, today many post sound facilities like us include sound effects directly from music libraries, but the technique created by Jack Foley still exists. Actually, it is the way in which many of these already cataloged effects are created. A clear example is the case of Star Wars. Ben Burtt, a renowned sound technician specializing in sound effects, came to create more than eight hundred sounds. The best known is the movement of the lightsabers, which was the result of using an audio cable without insulation on a tube television. This is an example of the difficulty of this endeavor. And so it is in the vast majority of cases: Foley ends up becoming an art, art still in process. It is not an easy task and requires a lot of imagination to come up with amazing ideas, such as the sound of the interior of an alien spacecraft, or how the skin of a werewolf sounds when he turns in the moonlight!

To learn more about how we can enhance your next project with Foley, contact us.

*The images used on this post are taken from Pexels.com