There’s a lot more to a movie’s audio than lines of dialogue or a musical score. There’s also the sound that everyday objects make: footsteps, spoons clinking against coffee mugs, the scrape of a chair leg on the floor. Those are the province of Foley artists, who recreate those diegetic sounds, and then add them to a film or TV show’s audio track during post-production.
Well WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin got to have a tour of Lucasfilm’s Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California. They already had three Foley stages, but in October they created a fourth, and it’s a facility built from the ground up to have all the design features needed for Foley artist John Roesch and his team to practice their craft. Over a nearly 40-year career, John has worked on everything from E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark to Interstellar and Frozen. He gave Peter, a tour of the new Foley stage, and gave us some insight into what foley is all about. Watch out for the Avid S6 and Pro Tools....
In this second video Peter Rubin from WIRED got to have a go and learn the art of foley from the masters at Skywalker Sound’s new Foley studio in Northern California. Since it opened in September, the crew has worked on Captain America: Civil War, Zootopia, and other projects.