Sprint 7

Last Friday I had the opportunity to rehearse the Gladiator portion of my thesis in the recording studio. This gave me a good idea about how the sessions this week will go and also allowed me the change to see which sounds worked and what didn’t work before I started the actual sessions. Foley is a relatively new thing for me. The projects that I have done so far are mostly in short form- recording sounds one at a time and then piecing them together later. What I’m doing now is do as many sounds as possible in time with the video- much like how Foley is done on an actual Foley stage. I know what I want it to sound like. The challenge is finding something to make that sound and most of the time it might not be what you think it is. Gladiator is easy in the sense that most of the objects are metal. But finding the metal object of the right weight, shape and using it in the way to get the right sound out of it is hard.

My first year at TCNJ I took an engineering design course where we read the Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. It talked about the principles of design and the principle of discoverability which is the ability to discover what operations one can do. Objects are designed for a purpose and well designed objects don’t need signs or manuals to operate. As a Foley Artist, I have to train myself to go against the rules of how these objects are used and discover all the ways it should not be used.