Footsteps | Short Doc about a trio of Foley Artists and How Movie Sounds...

Meet the artists who create sounds for movies – and have so much fun doing it

In 1938, the Orson Welles-led radio programme The Mercury Theatre on the Air – now best known for its infamous War of the Worlds Martian invasion scare – adapted Dracula as a radio drama. At Welles’s request, the CBS sound department needed to imitate the sound of a stake being stabbed through a vampire’s heart. After auditioning a cabbage being punctured by a broomstick (‘much too leafy’), Welles instead turned to a watermelon. Lucille Fletcher, writing for The New Yorker in 1940, recalled the session:

Welles stepped from the control booth, seized a hammer, and took a crack at the melon. Even the studio audience shuddered at the sound. That night, on a coast-to-coast network, he gave millions of listeners nightmares with what, even though it be produced with a melon and hammer, is indubitably the sound a stake would make piercing the heart of an undead body.

Today, the practical art of reproducing of sound effects for media is known as Foley – named after the legendary US sound effects pioneer Jack Foley (1891-1967). And as the Welles anecdote above illustrates, the work of these artists has been an essential tool for storytelling since the Golden Age of Radio, when radio dramas had to immerse audiences solely with audio. In Footsteps, the Canadian filmmaker Jeremy Benning explores the work of three contemporary Foley artists – Andy Malcolm, Sandra Fox and Goro Koyama – working out of Footsteps Studios in Uxbridge, Ontario. The trio carry on a tradition that, despite some technological advances, still mostly belongs to the hands, feet and many props of wily sound creators.

Benning’s short documentary offers a charming glimpse into Footsteps Studios’ 25-acre ‘Foley farm’, including the custom-built recording studio at its heart. Located an hour north of Toronto and far from the film industry’s epicentre, this studio is nonetheless one of the most respected in Hollywood. With the movies Cloverfield (2008) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the television show The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-), and the video game Red Dead Redemption (2010) among its hundreds of credits, there’s a good chance you’ve experienced their work. Although, as Malcolm points out, if they’ve done their job well enough, you wouldn’t have realised they’d done anything at all.

Foley artists bring stories to life by embodying the noises they create, tapping into our shared intuition for listening. Anything from the sound of a cowboy’s gun going off to something as simple as the squeak of a door hinge is recreated with keen attention to detail. This can be seen (and heard) throughout the film as Malcolm, Fox and Koyama reveal fun and surprising tricks of the trade. Fox likens their work to that of a musician – it’s not enough to simply mimic the sound of a shoe touching the ground, it has to sound three-dimensional, it has to sound human. Indeed, during the radio days, the first ‘sound effects men’ were percussionists recruited from the pit orchestras of movie houses.

In Footsteps, this search for the best sound for any given scenario sparks relentless ingenuity: jello is mashed and gargled to simulate vampires feeding on flesh; an improvised glove fitted with metal fingers is mined to create the sound of a robot’s touch. With perfectionistic streaks rivalling that of Welles, the group is clearly serious about their craft. But the artists’ joy at having found a niche that offers them endless opportunities for invention emanates from almost every scene. A ceaselessly entertaining watch, the film is an uplifting reminder that creative work doesn’t always mean a relentless grind to achieve fame and acclaim – sometimes it can be about striking just the right piece of produce with just the right blunt object.

Written by Tamur Qutab

Footsteps | Psyche Films

Everything Is Going to Be All Right (by Derek Mahon)

How should I not be glad to contemplate

the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window

and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?

There will be dying, there will be dying,

but there is no need to go into that.

The poems flow from the hand unbidden

and the hidden source is the watchful heart.

The sun rises in spite of everything

and the far cities are beautiful and bright.

I lie here in a riot of sunlight

watching the day break and the clouds flying.

Everything is going to be all right.

Not the Same River. Not the Same Man (animation by Michelle Brand)

A leaf, a bird and a fisherman animate Heraclitus’ aphorism on flux

It is not possible, said the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, to step into the same river twice. As the argument goes, the river is made up of constantly flowing waters, for one thing; for another, people themselves are always changing – life experiences accumulating like sediment on a stream bed. Heraclitus was alluding to the idea of flux: that it doesn’t make sense to think in terms of static states of being, but, rather, in terms of processes unfolding over time.

In the contemplative film Not the Same River. Not the Same Man by the German-English filmmaker Michelle Brand, a fisherman takes his boat out to a river, while a bird circles above, and a leaf falls, tracing ripples on the water’s surface. In just a few hand-painted lines of bold blue, black and red acrylic, Brand captures the river’s flow and the fleeting thoughts of the fisherman as they animate his face. Staggered, overlapping frames create an echo of movements just gone by. The pulsing soundtrack, by the Polish accordion ensemble Motion Trio, captures the insistent pull of the water. Both the river and the fisherman are in constant change, but they also transform each other: when the fisherman steps into the river, eddies swirl away from him; and the river washes and soothes his feet, feeds him with fish. A bird, flying in and out of the scene, seems to wait for the chance to catch a fish stirred up by the fisherman’s presence.

Animation, a process that turns static images into movement over time, is an apt medium for Heraclitus’ aphorism. Each frame is hand-painted, so even moments of stillness seem to flicker with the subtle variations in how a line was formed or how the paint dried. No two frames, and no two moments, are identical. Yet, the past leaves its mark on the present, like small waves in the boat’s wake.

Heraclitus’ ideas are known to us only through fragments, preserved in the writings of others, with most of his work lost to time. His aphorism of the river has been picked up and turned over like a pebble in the palms of so many thinkers over the millennia – accruing new layers of meaning through different interpretations. For some, Heraclitus’ ancient theory of flux even seems to have anticipated some of the latest ideas in quantum mechanics.

The idea of impermanence, of fleeting, ephemeral moments, can be a melancholy one for those who would wish to hold on to a cherished state, but the idea of flux also suggest possibilities for new experiences and sensations in the inevitable process of transformation. As the fisherman himself seems to dissolve in fluttering lines of paint, he joins the river on its course – a final metamorphosis wrought by time.

Written by Freya Howarth

Director: Michelle Brand

Not The Same River. Not The Same Man (2017) on Vimeo

Enter yourself, therefore, and know that your soul loves itself most fervently...

Saint Bonaventure quote from The Soul’s Journey into God 

 

CLOSE (by David Whyte)

is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done, close to saying something, or close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.

Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there: we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity: an intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation.

To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy, a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identities.

To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfilment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. We are in effect, always close, always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach; the step between not understanding that and understanding that is as close as we get to happiness.

 

‘CLOSE’
From CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
2019 © David Whyte:
CANONGATE BOOKS UK