Foley Reflection

What the project involved:

The project for this task was to do a Foley on Cloudy with a chance of meatballs dock scene. My group also had to do voiceovers of the 2 main characters and other ambient sounds such as footsteps, ocean, dropping of food, bird noises, eating sounds, and clanking noises. I worked in a group of 4 with Zack, Bruno and Max plus myself, we each had individual cues and roles for what we were going to be recording individually, we developed a cue sheet to help us with our organisation of this.

How I developed my ideas:

I developed my ideas for this Foley project by tapping certain materials and objects to try and recreate realistic sound effects for specific scenes, communication with my group also helped me to develop and expand on the sound bank we already had, to recreate the sound of burgers dropping we used our own bodies by slapping them. Most of the ideas that were developed were experimentation and worked well, there was little error on any of the sounds we came up with. The cue sheet helped to develop my ideas for the 30 seconds slot I had to record in, this meant when I went into the recording studio I knew everything that I was going to do beforehand.

Research I needed to do:

For my research I watched a video on Foley which showed us two actors who recreated different sounds in a studio live whilst the film was playing so there were many different objects scattered around to try and recreate realistic sound effects by smashing, throwing, stepping and walking.

How my research influenced my ideas:

The foley video I watched helped me to experiment with many different sounds when me and my group got hold of different objects, it allowed me to use my own body as a sound too rather than looking for an object to recreate this.

Software that I used:

The software I used was Adobe Audition Pro CC 2018 to edit the sounds and crop anything that wasn’t needed.  I also used Premiere Pro CC 2018 to add the video to the audio.

Tools that I used:

I decreased the volume levels on certain recordings to try and make the overall sound one consistent volume. I used the razor tool to cut off unneeded audio, e.g. dialogue that wasn’t part of the script.

How I exported the project:

From Adobe Audition Pro CC 2018 I exported it into Premiere Pro CC 2018 so I could then add the video and link up the audio. I then exported the final piece as format H.264 and then uploaded it to Youtube.

Here is my completed Foley work..

What went well:

• Recording the sounds.
• Making the sounds.
• Working in a group.

What I found difficult:

• Getting rid of the echo in the audio.
• Recording footsteps.
• Thinking of where certain sounds would work in scenes.

What I would do differently next time:

• Next time I would be more organised on where I put my cue sheet so I can share it with my group.
• Record more audio so I can get more quality sounds to work with
• Audio files were messed up so I should bring in my my hard drive in the future.

Is it a successful piece of work:

Its mostly successful as we recorded most of the main audio and there was a lot of dead air in some scenes, sometimes audio would cut out and cut back in again; if this could have been avoided it would have been completely successful. Overall the main dialogue was recorded so the large part of it was finished.