Foley sound: why footsteps are recorded twice and cloth is a performance

Foley is the practice of performing everyday sounds in sync with picture: footsteps, clothing movement, handling props, doors, keys, cups. Named after Jack Foley, it is recorded on a stage with surfaces called pits and a performer called a foley artist.

Why record it when production sound already has it

• Dialogue tracks are cleaned, gated and denoised, and the small movements go with the noise.
• The mix needs footsteps under music without the room tone attached to them.
• Foreign language versions replace dialogue, so all non dialogue sound must exist separately.
• Perspective and intensity can be tuned per shot, which a location recording cannot.

The three foley families

Feet: every footstep of every character, per surface, performed in sync. Cloth: the movement layer that makes a body feel present even when standing still. Props and specifics: everything picked up, put down, opened or thrown.

Delivery and organisation

Foley is delivered as stems, usually separated into feet, cloth and props, at the project sample rate and bit depth, matched to the reel start timecode. Consistent file naming matters as much as the performance: a mixer scrolling for a specific creak should find it from the filename alone.

Preparing foley files

Recordings often arrive as multichannel takes from a stage with several microphones. Split them into mono stems, keep the perspective you want, and convert to the delivery sample rate and bit depth before handing them over.

You can split, rename, level and export those stems locally in the browser, no upload involved.