Foley

As mentioned in my previous blog, the audio that we had in our raw footage wasn’t the best. The audio was very low, and we couldn’t hear much due to not having an external microphone. The footage was all really good, but it was hard to distinguish what was a punch, what was a dodge, and any of the engine sounds, grunts, and feet shuffling that we wanted to include. When Arianna began to edit what we want our final project to look like, she added on a bunch of royalty free sound effects, but we all agreed that they sounded too cartoony and not real at all. She also couldn’t include any of the diagedic sound that we wanted to include like the sound of the engines, the feet shuffling on the ground, and the crowd cheering. All these sounds aren’t payed much attention to by the viewer, but they add another layer of intensity and deepness to the scene. To create all these sounds, we want to try to do foley for as much as possible. For things such as the engine noises and the crowd cheering, we plan on getting the actual audio since it is very hard to make a foley noise like this. For the cars, we plan on taping a bunch of cars and layering all their sounds on top of each other to give it the right effect of a lot of cars. For the crowds, we plan to either tape at a soccer game at a local park, or the Miami Open, a tennis tournament is in town these next two weeks. 

For the foley sounds, we talked about getting a textbook and wrapping it in duct tape to dropping it on the floor or punching it. We hope that this will give the best effect of an actual punch. If that doesn’t work, we will try to punch the textbook instead. If we aren’t satisfied wit that, we will try bunching actual cuts of meat and seeing if it gives the same effect. I already tried it at the supermarket but wasn’t very satisfied since it had the plastic wrapped around it. If worst comes to worst, we will actually punch each other and get what the real sound sounds like. For the dodges, we will most likely get a long flexible stick, like a PVC pipe as swing it so it sounds like a “woosh”. We will try this multiple times to get a variety of sounds that we can add. For the feet shuffling we will record our feet shuffling on wet asphalt and synchronize it to what is seen on screen. The only sound that we think is left is the grunts, which we will record our actors doing certain grunts at certain times to match what is on screen. After we have all the sound we want, we will distort and layer it to make sure the volumes are at the right volume, and to make sure that it sounds how we want it to sound. We will probably get together and tape out sounds in the coming days when we can all get together.