When I shot my first wedding video back in Oct. 2018, I was pretty happy with what I captured in camera and thought I had enough to piece together a good wedding film.
It was until after I had delivered the video, that I noticed something was missing, a key component of immersion – FOLEY!
My first career out of high school was doing security for a mall, and inside the mall I was placed at TV store to stop thievery from occurring.
Just kidding, my job was to observe and report. My manager at the mall literally warned me not to be a hero.
There was no need for him to tell me that, $13 an hour was not enough for me to enter into physical combat with anybody.
Nonetheless, My presence kept the thieves at bay and things got stale in the TV store, so I found myself watching loops of Shakira – The Sun Comes Out World Tour ( I attribute me being a huge fan of hers to working at this store ) and Planet Earth with David Attenborough.
While Shakira’s concert was super, it was Planet Earth who captured my attention. The visuals were outstanding, and the music was too. But after watching the same BLU-RAY more than a dozen times a weird question popped into my head:
“How the hell did they record the footsteps of those penguins … ?”
I had my guesses back then as a budding security officer, but it was later on, when I went to film school that I learned of the world of foley, and not until many years later yet ( last year, haha ), would I begin to apply it to my own work.
For the uninitiated, foley was invented by Jack Foley many years ago. In its infancy, it was the process of generating and syncing sound live to film projection.
It’s difficult to imagine there was a time when real human beings had to make sounds live with pots and pans at a film showing for the audience, though not nearly as sophisticated as what we can do now, I bet it still added a much needed layer of immersion for the ticket buyers.
Back to my first wedding video.
While reviewing my edit, I began to notice that there were many missed opportunities for me to apply foley:
- foot steps
- clothing
- glasses
- liquid pouring
- laughing
- clapping
- etc..
So I made a goal with my next wedding video to spend some time at the end of the edit to add foley.
Here’s a snippet of one of the first tests:
It was a bit on the nose, but I could really feel myself being pulled into the video by the audio. Here’s how I layered the tracks:
- A bird chirping track suggests that we’re in a time of a year as well as a more natural locale
- A subtle track of rustling trees adds to the feel of being in nature.
- A more pronounced wood squeak on the wide angle of the dress
- Zippering up
- Car engine
- Car door handle opening
- Car door squeaking
- Some clothing rustle as bride settles into car seat
- Some twigs running through dirt and grass I recorded for the bouquet
- And finally, tires on gravel
And here’s another shot later on from the same video that I’m pretty pleased with as well in terms of foley:
Some foley items here:
- putting glass onto wooden chopping board
- dropping ice cubes into glass
- pouring water into glass
Even though I reduced the volume of all the foley sounds in the final edit, their presence helps the video tremendously and I got a lot of compliments from clients telling me how they love the audio/sound of my videos.
I’ve kept up the practice of adding foley as my last round of revision prior to sending it to client, and have yet to hear a client complain. So I guess I’m doing something right!
All that time spent watching reruns of penguins and Shakira is finally paying off.
I’ll wrap up this one with a clip of my tests in Houdini, listen close and see if you can spot all the foley tracks:
input + output 