In this video, shot by our friends at Audient, we take an exclusive look behind the scenes at the foley recording process for the award-winning TV mini-series, The Night Manager!

Barnaby Smyth from Feet First Sound shows how they recorded the footsteps, clothes movements, and more, for Episode 5 of The Night Manager.

Feet First Sound is made up of Foley Artist Barnaby Smyth, and Foley Engineer Keith Partridge, whose partnership has led to three Primetime Emmy Nominations and foley for a number of TV shows and movies including 'Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy', 'Guerrilla', 'Broadchurch', 'Tin Star' and more.

They use an Audient ASP4816 console to take in the audio and route it through to a Pro Tools 12 system.

What Is Foley?

Moves are usually performed first so the artist can get the feel of the scene. For example, the footsteps are all about walking on the spot with the right energy and feeling. Finding a range of good sounding shoes that work with different surfaces is the key. Usually old and worn in! Then it is about perfecting the technique of rolling the foot to create the illusion of forward movement, whilst going nowhere! The spot effects are then layered on top.

• Cellophane is used for fire crackle
• Leaves and shrubs can be created with camo netting, usually augmented with real foliage.
• Bird flaps can be achieved with gloves combined with real bird feathers.
• Snow footsteps are a combination of corn flour and dishwasher salt.
• White cabbages and watermelons are used to help punches and blood and guts respectively.

On ‘Alien vs Predator’ we made a series of wild track recordings (not to picture) for the movement of the alien creatures and the face suckers. We used over boiled pasta, cream, hair gel, swarfiga and diced raw meat to create an array of gloopy and gooey body movement sounds.

Audio Post Production Workflow - Foley

Barnaby Symth also contributed one of the episodes in our Audio Post Production Workflows Using Pro Tools series.