Music Technology Forum: Week 6 - Ashley Close

This week in Music Technology Forum, we had a guest speaker by the name of Ashley Close. Ashley was recently overseas where he won 2 awards at the APRA awards, one of them being the national award for film & television. He began to talk about other countries, and which ones are the best for a film & television career. Some countries mentioned were: America, Japan, China, India; but the "film capital of the world", he says, is Los Angeles.
He goes on to say if you are looking to make it big in the film & television industry, the best place to visit is Los Angeles as there is so many opportunities. Many movies are shot in Los Angeles. Some movies have been thought of in another country, and then transported to Los Angeles to bring the script to life.
Ashley then talked about the role of "foley". A Foley artist on a film crew is the person who creates many of the natural, everyday sound effects in a film, which are recorded during a session with a recording engineer*.
To 'foley' a scene with a person walking with keys in their hands, you would have to mic from ear level the footsteps of the person. You would also need to capture the sound of clothes rustling as the person moves. The clinging sounds of keys would have to be recorded, and not overdone to make it sound as real as possible. Sometimes dirt is placed on the ground to add to the footsteps effect.

Ashley showed us a video he foley'd for, which included a trains, motorbikes, guns, slow moving actions etc. Real motorbikes were recorded, sometimes recreating the scenes in the video. Fight scenes were also recorded while actors recreated them, giving that extra element of realism.

Lastly we were giving the opportunity to share some of our own music with Ashley for some feedback. Lauren's song was played, and was given some feedback on the vocals to maybe double track it and pan both left and right, whilst adding reverb to the centre vocals.

In conclusion I found this lesson incredibly interesting, and might be the direction I head for after this Sound Engineering course. Thanks to Ashley for giving his time for our class.

* Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_artist