The Magic of Foley Recording

In 2013, we created the original score and sound design for a piece by ChildLine, a confidential counselling service in the UK dealing with a wide range of issues facing many children and young adults. We worked with Buck to approach the subject of sexual abuse, creating a piece that helps children feel comfortable speaking with a counsellor at ChildLine. The animation is deliberately bare, enabling the storytelling to be achieved through sound – which needed to convey a realistic experience the viewer could identify with.

Structurally, we worked in tandem on the score and the foley. We followed a vague musical path, but it was clear that the sound needed to follow the heavily textured animation. You can hear significant musical shifts when the colour scheme changes. Spencer Casey, Composer & Sound Designer at Antfood highlights: “there are so many sound effects libraries, but I feel it is important to craft something bespoke for each project. The visuals of First Steps are so textural, making it even more important to record unique sounds.”

Most of the sounds you hear in the piece are representative, although some creative sequences and solutions stand out.

We had a lot of fun creating foley for the storm sequence at the beginning of the film. At the time of recording, our studio was in a loft at the top of an old 19th-century bookbinding factory. Thankfully, we were alone in the building when we recorded the bangs, echoes, and reverberations of dropped pieces of wood and trashcans in this huge, cavernous space. It was the perfect place to replicate the sounds of a storm.

One of the most memorable tricks was using the sound of running our hands along the bristles of a broom to represent the sound of a child running their hands through their hair. This gave a much more delicate and hyper-realistic result than recording human hair attached to someone’s head, adding to the anxiety and tension Ash, the protagonist, feels.

Several times during the video, we see text animated with a bubbly effect. To match these fluid, gloopy animations, we cracked eggs into a bowl and used a straw to blow into this thick, viscous liquid to make bubble noises. We also used the sound of the eggs cracking elsewhere in the film when the animations/text fracture.

There’s a moment approximately halfway through that’s quite interesting. We hear some footsteps, beginning as a couple of tentative steps before the character breaks into a run. Although you can find library tracks of people running, you can’t find tracks with the transformation in intensity we needed. When running, you naturally exert more physical force and weight when you are treading lightly, and this is represented in the frequency spectrum of the sound. It’s not something you can modify – you need to perform that.

You could say that creating footsteps for films is quintessential foley; there are many studios decked out with different floor materials and shoes. If we’re getting technical, foley is performing the actions to picture and recording it. Although we would record and then process the sound, we needed to ensure it was frame-accurate so we chopped up and edited a little bit.

Reflecting on the project nearly ten years after it was created, Spencer concludes: “I associate First Steps with Metamorphosis by Good Books, a fictionalised psychedelic journey through the mind of Hunter S Thompson. Whilst they have a very different vibe, they were made around a similar time, and both were animated by BUCK. Musically, what makes them both so special is that they combine foley with abstract musical sound design where we took instruments and synthesisers to create untraditional sound effects. This is one of the things that Antfood has traditionally succeeded in creating – a hybrid of music and sound design where the actual composition can act as sound design to a foley-driven piece.”

“First Step” Credits:

Client: ChildLine Directed by: Buck Executive Creative Director: Ryan Honey Executive Producer: Maurie Enochson Producer: Ashley Hsieh Creative Director: Joshua Harvey Associate Creative Director: Joe Mullen Designers: Joshua Harvey, Joe Mullen, Gunnar Pettersson 2D Animators: Laura Yilmaz, Kendra Ryan, Gunnar Pettersson, Claudio Salas, Matt Everton, Thierno Bah, Ege Soyuer, Zach Eastburg, Oliver Dead, Moses Journey 3D Artists: Yates Holley, Alex Dingfelder, Matt Everton Compositors: Claudio Salas, Alex Dingfelder, Oliver Dead Music and Sound Design: Antfood