Foley is the art of recording select sound assets after the production of a film/TV show has been completed. It is named foley after the man who pioneered the technique Jack Foley. It is the art of adding texture to a scene, grounding the audial landscape and making things seem natural and fuller. It can also be used to accentuate certain elements and often times really ties a film together. In major productions the vast majority of audio that is heard is entirely foley, or has been supplemented with foley.
There is a sound crew on most film sets recording audio so the question might arise, "why is a foley artist needed?"
Boom poles and microphones are synonymous with film sets. They record the audio whilst the cameras are recording the image. However, they are tasked with a very specific task and that is to capture the dialogue. When recording dialogue on set the operators sole task is to capture what the actors are saying to one another because that is an integral part of the actors performance and cannot realistically be replicated after the scene has been shot.
To accomplish this they use what are called Shotgun Microphones:
These microphones are designed to reject sound from the sides and only pick up good quality audio from directly in front of it. It has what's known as a hyper-cardoid pickup pattern as shown here:
As you can see by this graph. The mic can pick up the clearest audio from directly in front of it. The audio from the sides and rear are rejected. They use shotgun miss with this pickup pattern to reject all other audio and point the capsule directly at the actors mouth to just capture their performance.
This is because there is a lot of unwanted audio on a film set with footsteps and rustling clothes from people on set. Shotgun microphones allow the sound recordist to isolate just the vocal performance and cut out all other little annoying sounds that would muddy the sound.
Films however, do not only have dialogue as that would be vey alien and distracting. That's where foley comes in. It is a foley artists job to add texture back in. For example a door shutting in the background would sound tinny and thin. A foley artist can isolate the sound of a door shutting and record a much more full, thicker sound to layer in. This gives the sound more realism and life.
It is a fascinating profession and really brings films to life. It is made even more interesting when you think that foley is most successful when it's not noticed by the audience and is instead accepted as the actual audio of the objects in the frame. It is a huge part of film often overlooked.
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