Wayne:

Hi, my name is Wayne Pashley.

I'm referred to as a Sound Designer, Re-Recording Mixer or Supervising Sound Editor.

Any tricks and tips with foley?

You'll see some stuff online, on YouTube, about how, if you're doing a fight scene, people will use slabs of meat and they'll...

Or it could be a cabbage and you get the crunch sound. It's those sort of things.

Some people actually use fish, slapping fish or punching fish.

Now, it's like once you've done it once, again, catalogue it. You don't want to go buying a slab of rump steak every time you need to record a fight scene. So, that's one.

You'll see that sort of stuff on YouTube a lot. And you'll see the stuff, like if you've ever seen "Terminator", the metal man, when he goes through a prison door, with bars, and he goes through it, and basically that is an open dog food can and tipping it upside down and having their [suction sound] which was used for going through the bars.

Now, those tricks, you'll see, that's all about listening. You know, like sometimes, whatever you think the prop is that you have to record doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be that prop. Keep an eye out.

Foley guys that I know, foley girls and guys, and in fact, I got to tell you, a lot of girls are the best at it. For some reason, their timing and rhythm is amazing. Watching picture and getting it in sync.

There's a lot of those sort of tricks where they've collected props. They're junk hoarders, because they go to council pickups and find an old typewriter or an old computer that a drawer will work.

And these things, they've just got this like junk heap around them, but they've all got cool sounds. And sometimes what you think is going to be the sound from a given prop that you want to record doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the actual thing.

It could be something quite different. So that's all about listening.

A tip, very simple tip. Two, actually.

This is something that doesn't really, people don't talk about a whole lot, but remember, when you're doing footsteps, when you walk, it's about heel/toe, heel/toe.

When you walk out the classroom, think about the way your feet fall. You're walking heel/toe, heel/toe. You start doing that and you are on the spot doing someone walking across the screen... ...it's heel/toe. Don't go flatfooted. That's number one.

When you're running, if you've got a running scene, you're on your toes. It's not heel/toe, then. It's on your toes. That's a big tip, and I'll tell you that'll make your life a lot easier once you practise the heel/toe deal.

The other thing, really important, is clothes movements.

So clothes moves, or what we call rustle track sometimes. The actual material itself is really really important to help with your dialogues.

If it's a cashmere thing, is it some sort of vinyly sort of coat? Is it a big, big woolly parka? Is it just a simple silk shirt? To try to get the right materials is really important because it actually is going to help smooth out your dialogues along with the atmospheres.

Because it will attach to your character with when they're movements... It's quite loud.

[moves jacket with hands]

I don't know if you can hear that, but it's quite loud. And it actually really, really helps.

So, clothes movement, getting the right cloth for it, and heel/toe feet, they're my best tips for you for today.

If you're interested in sound design as a career for the future, can I recommend you watch a film called, 'Once Upon A Time in the West' by a filmmaker called Sergio Leone.

Even if you don't watch the whole film, even though it's a brilliant film, it's a western, have a look at the first half hour of that film.

Because there is no dialogue. It is all sound design. And every bit of that sound design was written into the script. Take a look at it, because you'll see the drama that comes from sound effects is incredible.

Other filmmakers to look out for is, I would say, Wes Anderson and I would also say Alfred Hitchcock. Their use of sound... And I'd actually say David Lynch.

Their use of sound is extraordinary in how to tell a story.

There's my tip. Okay, the experience I've had, the sound effects and foley, it's really varied. You know, I've got recordings that go back 30 years.

You know, analogue sound.

To this day I still use material from things I recorded way back then.

Digital sound is just the way the world is right now. Everything is digital. Your libraries are digital, they're all coming off your computers.

They're, you know, it's sort of like it doesn't really matter whether analogue or digital. It's whatever works.

What I tend to do with each project is when we've recorded a whole bunch of new material that's, and again, this is, it goes back to organisation and administration of your material.

You want to be able to catalogue it properly for the future. Because one day you're going to need it.

If you've gone to a huge deal to set up a recording, whether you've gone out recording horses, where you've gone to a horse wrangler, and you've found a beautiful location, with the right surfaces, with the dirt or rock or bridges or whatever, with a horse hanging about, you want to make sure you catalogue that stuff.

Because one day, it may be another 10 years time, but you'll remember, "Hang on a minute, "we've got that great horse over that wooden bridge. "Where is that?"

So yeah, in terms of my experience, is to, if you are interested in doing sound in the future, is start listening, start capturing.

Whether it's on your phone. I use my phone quite a lot.

If I’m out in the bush somewhere and I hear an interesting bird, I'll just hit the voice record thing, hold up the phone.

And I tell you what, that bird, you can take it, take that wave file back out, or so I think it's an MP3 off an iPhone, put it into your sound gear, I use Pro Tools from Avid.

Put it in, clean it up, catalogue the bird. "Oh, this was at the Grand Canyon..." "Great Raven." Boom. Clean up, sweeten it out, put it in the library, catalogue it.

Because one day you're going to go, "Gee, that was a good raven." So whatever you got at your disposal.

You know? Open your ears to the world. Start listening. Start listening, and then, yeah.

And that's my best advice there, with sound effects and cataloguing for the future.

It'll tell you a lot, too, about environments. Environments that are closing down.

Whereas 50 years ago you could be, you know, in some wonderful valley in Canada, and the bird life was extraordinary back there. It's now, 50 years later, where urbanisation has encroached, those birds are gone.

So, it's actually historical representation of what the earth was like through sound.