First Foley Recording session

This week Carissa and I started working on our foley sounds for our sound replacement for Coraline. This was an interesting process and had us both a little nervous as we had never done any projects like this before. We found the process to be rather different that working with a band. You really have to put your worries aside and try things out while working in this type of environment. We had a slow start but once we put our heads together we found a work flow that complimented our natural work styles. Carissa and I had also never worked on a project together so this was a very productive first session together considering this!

When we first got into the session we set up all the desk space and did a microphone shoot out. We had both brought a but of prior knowledge and research that we could share about what microphones we should test out. Neither of us has used a shot gun microphone before but had both read that they were ideal for foley due to the way they work. They are able to capture really specific sounds by flipping the phase of the sounding sounds of the microphone. I am gong

We decided to tackle this first session a little different than how we worked in our foley introduction class the other day instead of starting with the loudest sounds such as foot steps we decided to start with the clothing sounds and things that are easily looked over if you had all the other sounds in places. This was difficult at first as there is a lot going on regarding clothing sounds and body movements during the scene we chose. This was a good way to check our workflows and make sure we were on the same page and it really tested our ability to adapt to each others ideas quickly. In the end we worked for a few hours in the C24 and managed to get all the little annoying foley sounds down! it was such a great feeling after being so stressed at the beginning of our session.

The microphones we used for a shoot out include:

AKG C141

Sennheiser MKH416

RODE NT1A

Three quite different microphones to be honest. The condenser mics sounded good as well as the shot gun however we thought it would be best to try something new like the shot gun to play with some new microphone techniques and get used to handling microphones that are very specific. As far as the sound was they were both clean and clear however I found the sound from the shot gun was a lot more precise. There was some bleed even from clothing noises coming through while making softer sounds in the NT1. The C414 was a bit better with this but we were planning on making some softer sounds and figured as the shot gun was so precise sounding we would use it.

Some things we had trouble with included a fair few issues with the control desk. There was also an issue with the headphone line not working consistently. The biggest of our technical issues involved the TV screen in the foley live room making a very loud humming noise this took a while fro us to come to a solution for. We had to get a new TV to out outside the live room so that we could still see it while in the foley room.

Here is the progress so far of the sounds we have made so far:

I am happy with the process we are currently following and I believe the workflow we are trying out is defiantly working to our advantage. I am proud of what we achieved during this session considering all the set backs we had!