First Lesson - 9/9/15: Intro to Foley

First Lesson - 9/9/2015

Today was our first lesson, and Zhu Laoshi walked us through the elements of sound in film: ambience, dialogue, sound effects, ambience, and music. She told us for our first unit we would be working on "foley", which is basically the addition of recorded sound effects after the shooting of a film.

Zhu Laoshi then played us her documentary without the visuals, and we just listened to the sound and tried to guess and visualize what was happening. It started with the sound of birds cawing, which immediately made me think that the film was set in a farm, and the sounds of flowing water and crunching of leaves, and further bird caws only reinforced that belief. There were also the sounds of mumbling dialogue of a woman and mean which was quite unintelligible. There were also wooden clacking sounds that none of us could identify. Then we watched the film again with the visuals, and we were proven to have guessed relatively accurately. It was at a farm in the Irish/Scottish countryside, in the home of a middle-aged German couple. They were almost entirely self-sufficient, and had little to no use of electricity. The unknown wooden clacking sounds turned out to be a loom (an olden device used to weave fabrics), which is hardly found nowadays. Sound can emphasize or lessen the effect of certain actions or emotions of the characters. Even silence has an effect and can contribute to the atmosphere (as seen in the quiet countryside in Zhu Laoshi's film). Sound can also make films more realistic and interesting, and therefore is extremely important to film.