Making my own Foley

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Foley

During the research of my music videos, I realised that if a sound effect was used, it was foley. This goes for shot films as well. After some extensive research, I found two very good videos explaining what foley is and how to make my own foley sounds.

The first video explains what foley is:

How Foley is Made

And this video explains how to do it on a £0 budget:

Homemade Foley Effects

I took it upon myself to try and make some of my own foley effects. After reviewing my footage, the first sound I knew that I needed to replace was that of the plastic airsoft gun colliding with the wooden floor. It is so obvious that the gun is plastic and very light when it hits and ruins the effect for the film.

During my school day, I was scouring the media, graphics and sports department for any sort of small and heavy metal object. It didn’t take long to find this:

I have no idea what it is, but it makes exactly the same sound as a gun hitting wood/concrete. I wanted to get the sound quickly, so I used my Sennheiser PX-200 Iii headphone microphone and the Voice Memos app on my iPhone 4S and went to work:

It didn’t take long to get a realistic sound. I brough the audio onto my computer using Senuti then brought that to FCP7:

I used the sound for this shot and ended up with the gun sounding like it was metal.