View Full Version : Use foley to mask clothing rustle


Anmol Mishra
March 20th, 2013, 09:11 PM
I have clothing rustle in the audio for one of my actors. The scene is indoors.
What foley can I use to mask it ?
I do not want to do ADR and redo the entire sound.

Brian P. Reynolds
March 21st, 2013, 05:05 AM
Do you understand what 'Foley' is?
Foley (filmmaking) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_artist)

Anmol Mishra
March 21st, 2013, 10:29 AM
Hi Brian. I meant using a sound thats similar to the clothing rustle. For example, I could use a cutaway of paper streamers in the wind and use the rustling to show the noise of the streamers.
Foley can also be used to hide malfunctioning audio.

Warren Kawamoto
March 21st, 2013, 10:37 AM
Anmol,
Did the rustling happen during the dialogue, or in between words? Did it happen just once, or many times?
What kind of scene was it? In an office? In a hotel lobby? In a house?

Anmol Mishra
March 21st, 2013, 10:42 AM
The scene is set in a living room. The rustling is all over the dialogue.
However, I have minimized it by adding some traffic noise (it takes place in a city where traffic noise is heard if the window is open), and by manually removing any breaks between dialogue where I can hear rustling.
I'm just not sure how much rustling is acceptable when a film is viewed in a film festival.

Steve House
March 21st, 2013, 10:44 AM
Hi Brian. I meant using a sound thats similar to the clothing rustle. For example, I could use a cutaway of paper streamers in the wind and use the rustling to show the noise of the streamers.
Foley can also be used to hide malfunctioning audio.You are confusing Foley with sound effects. Foley is sound recorded in sync to picture to add the sound of things happening in the scene to the sound track. An example would be a scene of a character walking along a gravel path talking to himself. On location we'd try to record only the speech so we'd take pains NOT the get the sound of his steps. Then Foley would be the sounds of footsteps in gravel recorded later on the Foley Stage in sync with his footsteps on the screen to add to the illusion of reality in the scene. This way you can get the precise levels and tonality you want in the scene with more control than if trying to record both dialog and foosteps togetber,

Paul R Johnson
March 21st, 2013, 12:57 PM
You are really talking about masking an unwanted noise with an effect - and although this may well hide the rustling, intelligibility will be poorer. Engine noise is another common mask. People get quite upset when people talk about these things as Foley - (always with a F, never f) because the entire point of Foley recording is to re-record sounds that appear to be what we can hear - all those sounds that should be there, but aren't. Masking type noises that you can't see - are just effects.

Giroud Francois
March 21st, 2013, 05:35 PM
Usually , movies have a Foley soundtrack because
1) most of sound during shots cannot be properly captured or are inadequate.
2) if you need to distibute the movie dubbed in several language, you need to provide a track with no speech.

Ty Ford
March 23rd, 2013, 08:25 AM
I have clothing rustle in the audio for one of my actors. The scene is indoors.
What foley can I use to mask it ?
I do not want to do ADR and redo the entire sound.

Anmol,

Looking forward, was the problem caused by noisy wardrobe, bad micing, both or something else?

If lavs were truly the answer to great dialog, booms would have gone away a long time ago. There are two reasons boom mics are still with us. When operated properly, they sound better and it's very hard to get objectionable clothing noise with a boom mic.

The more active the actor and the noisier the wardrobe, the more you're going to have clothing noise. If Hollywood could do it without boom mics, they'd be gone.

Check this production shot out from "Moneyball". Either four or five booms on this "one camera" shoot. The talent is not moving around much, just sitting and talking.

Regards,

Ty Ford