So, last night I watching the latest Game of Thrones episode and several times during the episode I was taken out of it by loud clothing movements. Now this could easily just be me being in the frame of mind to be judging levels on everything and therefore being more aware of sounds in scenes and what they’re doing, or it could be that it was just that little bit too loud.
This has been something that I have been trying to be very aware of while mixing, as in past projects I feel that some of the Foley movements haven’t been quite subtle enough, being a bit jarring compared to other elements and therefore risking taking the audience out of the film.
As Randy Thom points out in his blog post ‘Detail Orientated (https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/detail-oriented/) “What really matters is the nature of the details, not the number of them”. This shows that simply putting sounds in where they technically should or could be is not actually enough to create a good finished product, to create a good finished product you need to in a sense pick and choose carefully, which sounds you use and why, accentuating a movement for example for a particular character who is doing some fantastical move jumping over a balcony would work, because the sound, hearing someone do that can bring the audience closer to the event and make it seem more plausible that could happen. However, accentuating someone moving their arm to shake someone’s hand doesn’t work to the same extent, making that way over the top would take the audience out of the film as that is already a plausible thing, one we know how it sounds when we do it already, thus it is a sound we don’t really pay attention to. That isn’t to say we don’t need any Foley for that, often we will, as it helps to just make the scene that much more realistic, bringing the audience further in to the film.
That was a considerable tangent as I was originally talking about more subtle sounds, but the concept still stands for the more subtle sounds, do we need to hear clothing every single time a character moves? No. Do we need to hear footsteps for every character under important dialogue as they walk down a busy street? No. So, while it might still be worth trying them in the mix, recording the Foley anyway, if they’re at risk of interrupting the flow of events or getting in the way of other, more important sounds, then they probably aren’t needed and risk taking people out of the film.