Foley

What is Foley in film?

Foley is sound performed to picture. A Foley artist watches the edited scene on a stage screen and walks, sits, handles props and moves fabric in sync with the actors while a Foley mixer records each pass. The result is a set of tracks that carry the physical life of the scene: shoes on a wooden floor, a coat brushing a doorframe, keys dropped on a table, a glass set down a little too hard.

The name comes from Jack Foley, who worked at Universal when films moved to synchronized sound in the late 1920s and developed the practice of adding sound effects live, in sync with the projected picture. Foley is one layer of the sound in film stack, next to dialogue, hard sound effects, ambience and music.

Almost all Foley is diegetic sound: it belongs to the story world and the characters would hear it. That is why it has to be invisible — the audience should believe the sound came from the set, not from a studio weeks later.

Why do films need Foley?

On set, the sound team's first job is dialogue. Location sound is captured with a boom and lavalier microphones aimed at voices, so footsteps, cloth and prop handling come out thin, off-axis or buried in generator hum and traffic. Many sets are also built to look right, not sound right: a stone castle floor may be painted plywood, a sword may be aluminum, a car door may be a prop with no mass. Foley gives each of those objects the weight the picture promises.

Three more reasons keep Foley stages busy:

• Control. Each character's footsteps and movements sit on their own tracks, so the mixer can raise a single step in a tense silence or pull cloth down under a line.
• The M&E track. For foreign-language dubbing, the film needs a music-and-effects track with no original dialogue. Any sound recorded on the dialogue mics disappears with the voices, so Foley rebuilds it.
• Storytelling. Close, detailed sound pulls the viewer into a character's body. In A Quiet Place (2018), where the family's survival depends on staying silent, every footstep, creak and rustle carries tension — a film built on small sounds needs them to be precise.

Good Foley is rarely literal. A punch in an action film is a composite that sounds bigger than any real punch; a footstep in a horror film is slower and heavier than life. The artist performs the meaning of the sound, at the perspective of the shot.

How is Foley recorded?

A Foley session is organized like a shoot. The Foley editor or supervisor spots the film and writes cue sheets: which character, which action, which surface, which reel and timecode. The artists then record in passes, usually split into three categories:

• Feet — footsteps for every character, one character per pass, on a matching surface and in matching shoes. Artists are sometimes called Foley walkers for this reason.
• Moves — the cloth track: rubbing a leather jacket, denim or silk near the mic in sync with body movement.
• Specifics — everything the actors touch: cups, papers, locks, guns, food, props of every kind.

The stage itself is quiet and fairly dead acoustically, with Foley pits — sunken squares of gravel, sand, dirt, concrete, tile and wood — plus shelves of shoes and junk. A typical setup is a large-diaphragm condenser or a shotgun mic about 30–90 cm (1–3 ft) from the action, sometimes a second mic farther back for a wider perspective. Mic distance is how the recordist matches shot size: close for a close-up of hands, farther for a wide shot of someone crossing a room.

Sync is performed, not assembled: the artist watches the screen and hits each step on the frame. The Foley editor then tightens timing where needed, and the tracks go to the sound mixing stage to be balanced against dialogue, effects and score.

Foley sound effects examples: classic tricks

Foley artists are known for finding the right sound in the wrong object. Some long-standing stage tricks:

• Bone breaks: snapping or twisting celery, carrots or a head of lettuce close to the mic.
• Punches and body hits: striking a cabbage, a raw cut of meat or a leather jacket, often layered.
• Footsteps in snow: squeezing a leather pouch or bag of cornstarch in rhythm with the steps.
• Bird wings: flapping a pair of leather gloves or a folded umbrella.
• Horse hooves: clapping coconut shell halves on a surface, a trick old enough that Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) turned it into an on-screen joke.
• Walking through grass or leaves: a pile of old audio tape or dry leaves in a pit.

The rule behind all of these is the same: the sound has to match what the audience sees, not what actually made it. A slightly slower, heavier squelch often reads as more real on screen than a recording of the real thing.

Foley vs. ADR

Both are recorded in a studio, in sync with picture, after the shoot, which is why they get confused. The difference is what is being replaced. ADR re-records dialogue: an actor watches the scene and repeats lines to fix noise, change wording or improve a performance. Foley records non-verbal physical sound performed by a Foley artist, not the actor. A single scene can use both: the ADR line replaces a take ruined by a passing plane, and Foley rebuilds the footsteps and cloth that were lost when the production track was muted under it.

Planning Foley on a FlashBoards board

Foley starts long before the stage session. Directors and sound supervisors who plan a film on a FlashBoards board can keep the storyboard frames, reference stills of surfaces and costumes, and notes on what each beat should sound like — "gravel, slow, heavy boots", "silk, barely there" — next to each other, so the spotting session begins from a map instead of a blank cue sheet.

Further reading

David Lewis Yewdall, Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound (Focal Press). Vanessa Theme Ament, The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation (Focal Press).