Mastering Footsteps and Future Technology

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One of the main characters is being forced to cook meth at gunpoint in a lab underneath an industrial laundromat. The mood is tense, and there's not a lot of dialogue. But that doesn't mean it's silent. The jingling of handcuffs , ominous footsteps on a concrete floor , the twist of a key , the mechanical lurch of a freight elevator . Those sounds matched the characters' movements so precisely that you might think they were picked up by a microphone on the set. But they were actually added in post-production by a guy with a bunch of makeshift props and a suitcase full of shoes. My name is Greg Barbonell. I've been a foley artist for about 46 years. As a foley artist, Barbonell is responsible for creating the smallest and subtlest sounds in film and television. From the swishing of a character's pants to the clink of a coffee cup being set down on a saucer. In a Hollywood that has become increasingly digitized, it's a job that still depends on the human touch. You're getting on the floor, you're picking up this chair, you're moving it over here. You're grabbing a car door. You're throwing it on the ground. You're jumping on it. You're taking a bat when you're hitting so-and-so. You're getting in the dirt pit on your hands and knees. For the Freeconomics Radio Network, this is the Economics of Everyday Things. I'm Zachary Crackett. Today, movie sound effects. When a movie or TV show is filmed on set, the only audio that the production team worries about is the dialogue. Most of the sound effects you hear are added in later on. These sound effects fall into two general camps. First, you've got what are called hard effects. Things like honking cars, thunderstorms, crickets, gunshots, and big explosions. In most cases, these are digitally produced or come from sound libraries. An editor and a dark room pulls a pre-recorded file off a hard drive and mixes it in to fit the scene. But other sounds have to be more closely matched to the movements of the characters on screen. And those call for a professional fully artist, like Greg Barbonell. It's all faked. So the footsteps you hear for the actors have been done after the fact. The cup down on the table has been re-recorded after the fact . The movement of their clothing as they get out of a chair or reach for an object is added after the fact. Even something like a gun will involve a little like picking up the rifle or the pistol, loading it, cleaning it, dropping it, putting a new clip in, we do . The art of Foley traces its roots back to the late 1920s, when sound was a relatively new phenomenon in film. An assistant director at Universal Pictures named Jack Foley built a special stage with a bunch of props and started adding sound effects to films in post-production . He drew inspiration from radio producers. They used coconut shells for horsehooves and a fan in a metal washtub for a car's engine . Decades later, the profession that bears Foley's name is largely unchanged. Barbonell's path into the trade began in the 1970s when he was a student at the California Institute of the Arts. At first, Television actor, but beyond that, good luck . Barbonel eventually moved behind the scenes. The summer after his senior year, he and some classmates made a western on a shoestring budget, and he was tasked with adding the sound effects. Footsteps, the clumping of horse hooves, and the clinking of metal spurs. I just started doing it, and I was fortunate enough to kind of have a knack for it. Barbonell had such a knack for Foley, he ended up doing it for the next five decades. He's worked for Walt Disney Studios, Warner Brothers Studios, and NBC Universal. And in the process, he has amassed nearly 600 credits, including TV shows like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, and movies like The Revenant and My Biological Clock is taking like this, and the way this case is going, I ain't never getting married. My cousin Vinny. The Foley process begins with a supervising sound editor who goes through the entire film and timestamps ever y cue that needs a sound effect . They'll tell us specifically in real one at fourteen feet twenty three frames this character's footsteps from here to here or pick up the rifle on this track, load the rifle on this track from here to here . Once the cues are identified, Barbonell goes into a Foley studio in Burbank, California that's equipped to create any sound imaginable. He usually joins up with a second Foley artist for his sessions. A sound mixer sits in a separate room. There's thousands of cues, so the session itself, as you can imagine on a feature film , is huge. Some of the sounds on a slight seem easy to recreate, but there are also certain sounds that aren't so straightforward. For the 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine, Barbonell had to create the sound of an old beat up VW bus. I had a bunch of props on the stage for the bus. There was like a big car hood, and there was a car door thrown on top of that with some other weird metal th ing on it. And I happened to step on this pile and it made this incredible metal deep metal groan . This you know, I went, oh my god, that was awesome. And you know, it came to be what we need, this would be perfect for when they first start pushing the bus. Everybody push all right I'm putting it in gear the job isn't always about creating a perfect replica of what something sounds like in real life. My job is to go beyond what things actually sound like, to embellish a little bit, uh make it a little more dramatic or a little more scary. If I needed to recreate a McDonald's ice cream machine, I would not go to a McDonald's and listen to it. Film is its own reality. I can make that machine sound however the hell I want. Making things sound however the hell you want requires a lot of weird props. Barbonell Studio is lined with plastic boxes full of tools, guns, suitcases, and old telephones . He spent years scouring metal junkyards and swap meats for contraptions that make strange noises. Meat the meat grinder. This is an old school countertop meat grinder. You put the meat on the top, you crank it. The end that you grab with your hand has a little plastic sleeve on it that rotates. And it sounds like this. Here you go. So I've used this for a whole lot of things, mostly when someone turns on a tap in their bathroom, but also in a lot of animated things, someone's pulling a little wagon or something and I'll use that to add an element of squeakiness to the wheels. To recreate the sound of a character leaning back in a leather armchair, Barbonell uses an old ammo pouch he found at a surplus st ore. They had a pile of these and I went through them until I found the one that was you breathed on it it would make a incredible leather creak . If he needs to replicate the sound of a screen door opening, he uses a pogo stick from the 1960s. And for machinery, he'll sometimes blend together sounds from multiple different props, like this flower sifter . I use that in this one scene in Spirited Away . That weird guy down in the basement with all the moving machinery parts and everything. Part of his ongoing machinery sound, that was one element of it . Blood and guts also require some special tool s. When Barbonell was working on the zombie apocalypse show The Walking Dead, he had some go-tos . The main ingredient in a really good chamois. It's like a thin calf skin. When you get it wet, it becomes this blob of material that retains water, and if you squeeze it, it's incredible the sounds you get out of it. One of my favorites is walnuts. I put one or two under my foot and slowly apply pressure until they crack and crun ch. Like a bone snap. Another favorite is lasagna noodles. Dry out of the box . Sometimes actual meat is used The Foley artists for the 1999 film Fight Club hit chicken carcasses with baseball bats to replicate punches. Barbonell used to employ similar tactics, but those days are behind him. Back in the day, I literally got half a pig or something. It stunk up the stage forever. Let me tell you, it wasn't worth it. There are all kinds of stories like this in the world of Foley. For E.T., Foley artists use raw liver and jello to simulate the sound of the alien's body. The sound of hatching dinosaur eggs and In the Exorcist, an old leather wallet was twisted to mimic the sound of a rotating human head. But creating strange and unique sounds isn't actually the most important part of a fully artist's job. It's the mundane stuff that matters the most. What separates the men from the boys in the Foley World is how you do the footsteps. That's coming up . Sometimes the most important personal breakthroughs are made possible by medical ones. And that's why Yale New Haven Health's Heart and Vascular Center delivers the pioneering science of Yale School of Medicine, like groundbreaking research that helped redefine the international guidelines for treating heart failure and a new procedure to detect coronary microvascular disease often misdiagnosed in women. Yale New Haven Health and Yale School of Medicine together were powering breakthroughs with the greatest of care. It's smart to always have a few financial goals and a really smart one you can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can get this Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See terms at Discover.com slash credit card. It's hard not to add a side of hot crispy hash browns to your favorite McDonald's breakfast. It's even harder not to eat said hash browns before you get home. After a movie or TV show is filmed on set, there are often lines of dialogue that need to be fixed in post-production. Sometimes the director doesn't like the delivery, or there's some kind of noise like an airplane in the background. When those lines are retracked in a studio, all the other tiny sounds that got picked up on set are lost. Which is why Greg Barbanel spends a lot of his time in the Foley studio recording the sound of clothing. A very intimate scene, two lovers on the sofa, and they start going at it and there's no dialogue. And I just manipulate the cloth and I follow their movements and Barbonell's perfect cloth sounds something like this . Some jobs do require specialty cloth, and Barbonell has All kinds of you know super thin silk . After the cloth work is done, the next and perhaps most important job is the footsteps. In a typical film, you've got characters with all different types of shoes, walking on all different types of surfaces. They have different gaits. They're walking, running, maybe dancing. Fully artists have to record the appropriate sound for every single foot that touches the ground. Barbonell Studio is equipped with every conceivable surface material. He can do footsteps on concrete, metal grating , wooden boards, okay, kind of a hollow wood deck . And on dirt To get the job done, Barbonell also has a huge arsenal of shoes. At the peak, I had a garage half filled with shoes. I had my favorite work boot or fire man's shoe or general men's shoe, tennis shoe, ladies' flats, ladies' heels. For Barbonell, footsteps aren't just a technical addition. They're a way to convey personality. It takes years to develop the subtlety and being able to nail not just the character but the emotion of the character in how you perform the footsteps. Some film stars movements are harder to track than others. I did a couple Jackie Chan movies. Utter frickin' nightmare. Because in most of his movies there's a great deal of fighting. And the problem with Jackie Chan is he'll like bounce between buildings, fire escapes, windowsills, cars, hoods. So he might hit a fire escape with his right foot, the next foot is gonna be on a metal pipe. The next step is going to be on a brick wall. Instead of just going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all on one surface. You know I have to break it down into minute little pieces to get it just right . You know, given the time and you want it to be just right. You want to hear the metal ting bang boom . I literally wanted to check into a hospital after working on some of those . All of this work is very time-consuming. Doing foley for a film like Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse can take 20 to 30 days and require multiple sound crews. An intensive TV show like Breaking Bad used to take Barbonell two to four days per episode