Live Foley Sound

24th Jan 2011

 This week I've been working in Cologne on a German-language version of a theatre piece called Waves, which I originally designed at the National Theatre (England) back in 2006. It's a little different from most pieces of theatre in its use of sound and video. We had to use different techniques because of the nature of the novel on which it was based, Virginia Woolf's The Waves. The novel follows the lives of 6 unremarkable people from their childhood to old age, but entirely through the thoughts of the characters - there are no descriptions, or dialogue, as we know it. As an example:

'And time,' said Bernard, 'lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop. Last week, as I stood shaving, the drop fell. I, standing with my razor in my hand, became suddenly aware of the merely habitual nature of my action (this is the drop forming) and congratulated my hands, ironically, for keeping at it. Shave, shave, shave, I said. Go on shaving. The drop fell. All through the day's work, at intervals, my mind went to an empty place, saying, "What is lost? What is over?" And "Over and done with," I muttered, "over and done with," solacing myself with words. People noticed the vacuity of my face and the aimlessness of my conversation. The last words of my sentence tailed away. And as I buttoned on my coat to go home I said more dramatically, "I have lost my youth."

The whole book is online here

Having been told by someone that we would be committing career suicide to try and stage The Waves, we workshopped various ways of telling the story - acting it out, extrapolating dialogue for the characters to say to each other, but the stream of consciousness of the novel is such a part of the experience of reading The Waves that we knew we had to find a way to incorporate that. We started experimenting with how we could enter the heads of the characters which led us to using voice overs. We also experimented with shifting the audiences listening perspective from a naturalistic representation of a place, to inside the characters head. So, for example, when the characters find out about the death of Percival, the naturalistic sounds blur away and are replaced by that noise that rushes through your mind when you hear of someone’s death. This is, of course, very normal in the world of cinema, but less usual in theatre.

We were simultaneously experimenting with how to add sound effects to these thoughts - both the naturalistic and the abstract, and how we could add them live during the show. LIve sound effects are nothing new in theatre - for centuries there have been “noises off”, from thunder created with canon balls rolled down ramps around the auditorium (Bristol Old Vic and London's Drury Lane Theatre both still have them) to bird calls voiced by actors. I came across a book a long time ago called Noises Off, written in 1934 by Frank Napier, ostensibly the stage manager of the Old Vic Theatre, but who worked across London as an “effects man”.  It's written as a practical guide for other theatres to create live sound effects, and is fascinating - copies appear on Abe Book's every now and again. One chapter describes how to create the sound of a steam train using 12 stage hands and a variety of props, which would be repeated live for every performance. Nowadays it’s much cheaper to have a computer than it is to have 12 stage hands. But, in a world in which technology was expensive and labour was cheap, this was the perfect way to achieve the effect. A lot of these techniques became part of radio drama in its heyday and are still used, most notably on the BBC's The Archers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12094380

These techniques are now most regularly used to create Foley sound, which is one of the layers of sound you'll hear on virtually every film you've ever watched, and on most mid to high budget TV productions. Film and TV are often shot in often less than ideal conditions from a sound point of view. Take any period drama, say Pride and Prejudice, as an example - it'll be set in the 1800's and filmed in various stately homes around the country. Unfortunately, most of those stately homes are now near busy roads or in the flightpath of an airport. For a scene shot in a garden every line of dialogue and footstep that's recorded may have traffic and air traffic noise on it, and everything recorded may be completely unusable. Sometimes it can be fixes in post production with noise reduction software, but sometimes not. In that case, all that dialogue will be re-recorded in a studio at a later date in a process known as ADR. The sound team then have to recreate the rest of the soundtrack: birds, wind, streams, etc - some of this can be achieved using sounds recorded on location or sourced off sound effect libraries. But, there are lots of sounds made by the performers, such as their footsteps, clothing rustle and various other unique aspects of the performance that are best added by another performer - the Foley Artist. To add footsteps they will watch the film and imitate the walking of one of the actors onscreen as they walk, jog, shuffle, skip, sprint, jump, etc. In our Pride and Prejudice example the performers on screen might start the scene at the top of some stone steps, walk across gravel and onto a lawn, so the Foley Artist has a number of surfaces in the sound studio to create the right sound. Sometimes that right sound isn't created by the same thing as seen on screen. A large ball of magnetic tape being stepped on sounds more like grass than grass does! Foley Artists are also asked to create sounds that have never existed before such as the sound of a dinosaur hatching:

The Foley Artist has to be highly responsive to the performance being foleyed, and is often interesting to watch in itself, as the sound being created is often at odds to what is being used to create it. This was one of its qualities that we wanted to explore in front of the audience.

We had also decided to explore how we could use video in the show to explore the shifting perspectives of the characters thoughts - theatre is often about the "mid shot" as we can rarely achieve a close up. So we started experimenting with cameras and a projection screen to focus in on certain small images - an eye looking through foliage of someone hiding in a hedge, for example, whilst we heard their thoughts voiced over the image. This technique proved itself ideal for the stream of consciousness style of the novel and we expanded it so there are projected images for about 90% of the show. As we were creating the voices and sound effects live we were keen to try to construct the images live as well.

The end result was that on the projection screen you saw an almost continuous film complete with soundtrack. On stage level you saw all the elements that made up the construction of the image. The video below shows the construction of one scene, where a character is having a meal in a restaurant. They then remember a thought they were having in the bathroom earlier - so we cut back and forth between the restaurant and the bathroom. There are two mobile cameras used in this sequence, plus a third overhead camera. The performers are, as well as acting, moving all the cameras, lights, doing voice-overs, foley sound and creating abstract sound effects. Over on the left you can spot someone doing cutlery and shaving foley sounds, and another person is bowing a fish bowl.