Foley editing is something I have experience doing in previous projects such as Sound for Screen. Though this foley editing job was much more straightforward to my previous experiences as we were only recording simple sounds such as footsteps, button clicking, and speaking.
The foley editing was not my original job, but as it never got sent to us, after two weeks I decided to do it myself. The foley was all edited inside Ableton Live 11. I used Ableton as for some of the sounds such as the speaking, we wanted it to sound very odd and Ableton is built for experimentation.
Something important to remember when editing foley, is what needs effects and to be messed with, and what just needs to be trimmed and eq’d. For examples, the footsteps were just edited and was faded straight after to make it sound clean.
Meanwhile the speech in the game was transposed up and was warped (warp is a function in Ableton in which a sample can be warped to it stays in time with the sessions BPM, or unwarped so it is not quantised to the BPM of the session) I kept the speech warped, as the speaking glitched and tripped up over it self, creating a jarring sound. It was then transposed up +10 semitones, creating a high pitch, childlike voice. Here a snippet of the speech with no processing, here is a snippet with processing.
One of the challenges I ran into while editing the foley was the fish sounds. We were tasked by Ana to make some fish noises for the game. Tom (one of the sound artists in our group) started to flick his cheek with his mouth in a O shape, making a noise like a fish. The issue with the sound was that I did not have the microphone turned up enough on the H5 recorder. So, in turn the recording was incredibly quiet. The issue is with this is that if you put the file into Ableton and turn up the gain on that file. You hear all the background hiss and noise, making the recording noisy and difficult to use.
I started to try and cut down the excess noise by using an 8 band EQ on the sound, to try and EQ out all the high frequencies. This worked at first, but since there was so much background noise, it started to sound like you were underwater and the actual fish noise was being altered in a way I did not want.
As you can see above, this is my effects chain for the fish sounds audio. I ended up using a built in Ableton plug in called ‘Remove’ which lets you have the ability to remove low, mid, and hi frequencies. I found this quite easy to use and ended up removing most of the hiss without ruining the fish sounds. I then used the Valhalla supermassive reverb to give more space to the fish sounds. Finally, I used a plug in built into Ableton called ‘Make It Loud’, which does as the name says. This gave the sound a boost in volume to match the over sounds in the game.
Due to the foley not being mixed and having to do it myself, Ana put in some placeholder sounds while we were waiting. Some of these sounds are in the walkthrough, like the elevator doors, some of the sound effects and some of the NPC talking. Though most of the sounds heard were made by us.
Overall, I found the process of editing the foley very enjoyable and a fun way to experiment with editing and experimenting with the sounds that we recorded.