Foley
I tried to make some progress recording the breaths for the main character in my room, however it did not work too well. There was a slight reverb and as my room is situated on the ground floor of a house at the front, I had a lot of unwanted noise from the road outside.
I rented out the composition and foley studio to record the rest of the foley, however I was limited by a 3 hour time slot, I didn’t manage to record everything I needed. I used a highly directional shotgun microphone because although the foley studio was acoustically treated, there was still some bleed from people using the synthesisers next door. I started by recording the footsteps, this process took about 2 hours. I filled one of the trap doors with gravel and rocks, I also used some audio tape for the sound of vegetation. With this set up I was able to achieve a number of different textures, mountainside with dry grass (using the tape), gravel hillsides (using the larger rocks) and hard mud (by scraping the larger rocks out of the way and using the smaller ones against the concrete) . I found the process quite challenging at first, I often fell out of the rhythm of the steps, or starting at the wrong point. Eventually me and Raul (in the control room) figured out a method, we would watch the shot and say the rhythm of the steps, we would also figure out when the first step is and which leg it was. I could then record the track in fewer takes. I got the hang of making different surfaces pretty quickly, but I found making footsteps for different people more challenging. I recorded all of the male footsteps with my own shoes while I was wearing them, but later the time came to record the female footsteps. The method I came up with was using my hands holding some smaller shoes, I found it difficult to simulate realistic footsteps this way but after a while I sort of got the hang of it, I also ended up pitching the footsteps up in post. Due to the time restraints I didn’t manage to record footsteps for the donkey, I would have done this with some hoof sized pieces of wood or rocks, depends on what sounded better.
Next came the sound of the coffin.
This sound came out surprisingly well. I used an old wooden violin case and wrapped it in rope. I then recorded a track of me keeping the case still under my arm while pulling and creating tension on the rope, this was for the sound of the coffin on the donkey’s back. After this I recorded the scene where the character carries the coffin on his back, to do this I increased the tension of the rope in sync with the steps of the character. I did encounter a couple of problems with this as the violin case had some cracks in it, and occasionally when I pulled the rope, pieces of wood would build up tension and release resulting in a plucking sound, this didn’t really fit the picture. I solved this by cutting around it and removing the plucks in post.
All in all the session was very successful, and I learned a lot of things. I really enjoyed the process as I found myself working around problems in creative ways, it’s very strange working in a way that only vales the outcome, in foley it doesn’t really matter what you do to achieve a sound, as long as the sound works.