Footsteps Are Made by Hand

When The Jazz Singer made silence commercially impossible in 1927, Universal had a nearly finished silent musical on its hands called Show Boat. The studio went looking for anybody with radio experience, and among the people who answered was Jack Donovan Foley.

The technical situation he walked into explains the whole craft that followed. Microphones of the period, placed to catch a performer's voice, picked up dialogue adequately and almost nothing else usefully. Footsteps, doors, cloth, cups, horses, rain: all of it was either absent or arrived as a smear. If you wanted a film to sound like a world, you had to add the world afterwards.

The method Foley's crew used was brutally simple and left no room for error. The film was projected. They performed the effects in front of a microphone, in sync, watching the picture, and the result went onto a single track in one pass. A footstep landing a quarter of a second late stayed late. There was no edit, no nudge, no layer to drop.

That constraint is gone, and the stage is not. A Foley stage today still consists of a performer watching a picture and physically doing what the actor appears to be doing, on surfaces built into the floor, with a wall of objects behind them.

The famous props are real, and the reason for them is the useful part.

Coconut shells for hooves. Cornstarch packed in a leather pouch, squeezed rhythmically, for footsteps in snow. Crushed cellophane for fire. Celery or lettuce broken near the microphone for bones, or walnuts, or small apples on a hard floor. A phone book struck for body blows, leather gloves flapped for wings.

None of these are substitutes for a recording nobody could get. In most cases a recording of the real thing is perfectly obtainable and simply does not work. A real punch, recorded honestly, is a dull brief thud that an audience reads as nothing at all. Real snow is a faint crunch. Real fire at a safe distance is a roar with no detail in it.

What the ear is doing, when it decides whether a sound belongs to a picture, is not verifying causation. It is checking shape: how sharply the sound begins, how it decays, what texture sits inside it, and whether all of that suits the size and weight of the thing on screen. Cornstarch in leather has the right granular attack for a boot in snow in a way that snow does not, through a speaker, at the volume a film is played.

So the craft is a search for a sound whose shape matches the image, which is a different task from recording what happened.

There is also a hard commercial reason the department still exists, and it is worth knowing because it explains why Foley is not an indulgence that digital libraries could have retired. Every film sold into another language needs a music and effects track: everything except the voices. If the footsteps and the cloth and the doors were captured on the same track as the dialogue, there is no way to replace the dialogue without losing them. A separately performed effects track is what makes dubbing possible, and dubbing is where a very large share of a film's international money comes from.

Keep that principle for the next three lessons, because the rest of this book is the same idea in other departments: a voice recorded in a dead room and placed into a space it was never in, a weapon that does not exist built out of a projector motor, and a shark represented by two notes.