Foley
Custom sound effects performed in sync with picture. Footsteps, fabric, kisses. The reason your film feels real.
- COINED
- 1920s
- TAXONOMY
- AUDIO
- RELATED
- 4
- TEMPLATES
- 0
Foley is custom sound effects performed in sync with picture. Footsteps. Fabric rustling. A kiss. A door latch. The clink of a coffee cup. Named after Jack Foley at Universal in the 1920s.
Why not just record the production audio? Because production audio captures everything - the boom mic, the wardrobe, the lav, the actor's actual footsteps and the AC running and someone outside slamming a car door. Foley lets you replace all of that with clean, controlled, dramatized sound. Footsteps on a foley stage are louder, sharper, and more specific than reality.
Watch any film with foley off in your head and you'll suddenly notice how artificial real life sounds. The foley stage is doing more work than you ever realized. Most modern films have 800-1,500 individual foley cues.
Any narrative film. High-production-value commercial. Anything where sonic detail is part of the craft.
Vérité documentary that wants raw production audio. Some podcasts. Very short social content.
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Background sound of a location. Crickets, traffic, hum. Always record a 60-second ambience track.
A specific, sync-locked sound - gunshot, door slam, glass break. Pulled from libraries or recorded fresh.
Built from multiple layers. The lightsaber, the TARDIS, the Inception bwaaam.