Cinema Foley Sound: The Art Of Seamless Movie Audio & My High School Nosferatu Film & TV Foley Assessment Fresh From VHS!

Ever wondered how movies sound so amazing and real? Well you may be surprised to learn that most of what you hear is faked in post-production. The art is to make it seem so much like this isn't the case that the audience never even thinks about it.

Firstly some quick background. Where does the term "Foley" come from? I'll borrow from Wikipedia here.

Foley (named after sound-effects artist Jack Foley) is the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film, video, and other media in post-production to enhance audio quality.[1] These reproduced sounds can be anything from the swishing of clothing and footsteps to squeaky doors and breaking glass. The best Foley art is so well integrated into a film that it goes unnoticed by the audience.[2] It helps to create a sense of reality within a scene. Without these crucial background noises, movies feel unnaturally quiet and uncomfortable.

When I studied film and television in High School, one of our assessment requirements was to select a silent film clip and add all the audio tracks for submission. The accuracy, volume, timing and realism were all graded.

I've been recently converting my old VHS tapes and have this week been focused on these high school submissions. For this Foley submission, I was in a team of 3 and we chose the 1922 silent German film Nosferatu as the clip. It's only a minute and a half but everything you hear (save the VHS crackle) we painstakingly added.

This is a classic clip based on Dracula by Bram Stoker and we wanted to do it justice. I'll walk you through some of the audio that was required.

• The background track - I'm fairly sure we borrowed this from A Clockwork Orange. A film we loved at the time and used in our Music Clip assessment that you can watch here.
• The howling of Count Orlok. We tried to make him as beast like as possible.
• The Count's footsteps as he walks up the stair case.
• The sliding sound made by Thomas Hutter's wife and Count Orlok's victim, Ellen Hutter, as she moves against the wall.
• The creaking door.
• Ellen's steps as she backs towards the bed and the ruffle of the sheets as she moves over the bed.
• Ellen's gasp as she turns her face away. Embarrassingly, this is actually me gasping into a microphone in 1996.
• The fictitious and symbolic "symbol" sound made as the shadow of the Count's hand clenches Ellen's heart. Again this was me! I had a cold at the time and I "sniffed" into a microphone and added some reverberation and echo effects to create this sound - I bet you never would have guessed that!
• All rooster calls
• The cries of pain as Count Orlok enters the sunlight. This was a combination of effects mixed together to create quite a demonic result.
• The sound of the flames on the floor that fade in prior to the visuals.

As a final note, the timing of the background chime in the music being aligned with the appearance of the text "THE END" was no accident. We synchronized the audio such that this part of the music would appear at the same time as the text and that dictated what part of the music was played at the start. You probably wouldn't pick that watching it from the beginning.

It was an excellent assessment and the three of us enjoyed the work greatly. It gave us a great appreciation of how much effort goes into the most subtle audio additions and given the equipment available to us in 1996 I think it's still an impressive High School assignment today.

Enjoy!