Monday morning in the small Essex town of Coggeshall, and in an unassuming building that used to be a laundry, a man named Barnaby is trying to sound like a horse. Trying and succeeding, uncannily. Not neighing or whinnying, just making the sound of the hooves on the ground.
In a big screen on the wall of a windowless room is an armoured knight astride a white warhorse. It’s Richard III, as it happens, accompanied by a gaggle of guards, also armoured and mounted. It’s a scene from The Lost King, Stephen Frears’s upcoming film about the woman who, after 30 years of looking, discovered Richard’s remains under a Leicester car park.
Barnaby – Barnaby Smyth – squats in front of the screen, staring intently at it. In front of him on the floor is a square of compacted earth with a microphone pointed at it, like a heron waiting to strike. Smyth has got some vegetation handy, a few vines and autumnal leaves, but he has pushed it to the side; he doesn’t need it for this scene, just the hard ground. In each hand he has spindles from the centre of rolls of old 35mm movie film, wrapped in gaffer tape.
When, on the screen, King Richard turns his white courser and moves off, Barnaby hits the earth with his spindles exactly in sync with the hooves, first at an accelerating walk, then a little stumble into a canter before settling into a rhythmic gallop. Ignoring Barnaby and watching the screen, you would swear you were hearing a heavy horse galloping off across Bosworth Field, in 1485. It’s perfect; the only disappointment is that Smyth is not using coconuts to make it. “Coconuts can be a bit hollow-sounding,” he says. “These are just more …” and he hits the ground with them again. More like the sound of a galloping horse, clearly.
Welcome to the weird and rather wonderful world of foley. Named after Jack Donovan Foley, who pioneered many of the techniques in the 1920s, foley is the addition of everyday sound effects to film or television in post-production – incidental sounds such as the squeak of a chair, the chink of bottles in a fridge door, the swish of clothes or a swinging handbag. And footsteps, lots of footsteps, both human and non-human. “It steers the narrative, where to look, how to feel,” Smyth says. “Foley adds that focus to draw the attention of the audience.”
Feet First Sound is a foley studio, and Barnaby Smyth is a foley artist and supervisor. Keith Partridge – headphoned and sitting at a big mixing desk at the back of the room – is a foley engineer. Basically, Smyth makes noises and Partridge records them and fiddles with them to make them better.
The room is an odd mix: part hi-tech modern recording studio, part junk shop. There are trays and trolleys of bottles and glasses for chinking and rattling, books and pens (although if Smyth wants to make the noise of a really nice fountain pen, he’ll often use a bicycle tyre pressure gauge, which sounds heavier and classier and actually more pen-like).
And there are shoes, shelf upon shelf, hundreds of them. This smart pair of brogues Smyth wore to add to Gary Oldman’s steps as Churchill in Darkest Hour. They recorded in Churchill’s War Rooms in Westminster, for added authenticity, as well as here in the studio. And these dowdy, black, size 10 heels are the ones he wore to dub the hurrying typists in the same film, as well as scurrying servants in Downton Abbey. A big pair of army boots? Nazis, naturally – in the BBC drama World on Fire, also the movies Suite Française and The Aftermath; they do a lot of Nazis.
If this room is a junk shop, then the one next door is full-on car boot sale – a huge space, jam-packed full of pretty much everything. There are banks of drawers labelled “medical”, “belts”, “sports”, “police”, “bones”, “makeup”, “gloves”. He shows me how he makes the sound of a pigeons flying away by flapping a pair of leather gloves together. He did it for a recent episode of Baptiste. There are crates filled with different kinds of ground to walk on: leaves, bark, forest soil, mossy soil. Smyth shows me how to make the noise of boot on snow by twisting a pillowcase full of cornflour. You want scrunchier, more compact snow? Add dishwasher salt.
On the wall are real weapons: decommissioned rifles and machine guns, swords, axes (“We’re all set for the zombie apocalypse,” he says, cheerfully). On the floor are piles of old tech: telephones, keyboards, the ZX Spectrum used in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. It’s Marie Kondo’s worst nightmare: nothing gets thrown away. Even the cardboard packaging that the mixing desk came in was kept. With a rubber mat on top, it made the sound of the gym floor in the boxing film Journeyman. For the punches, Smyth held a microphone in his mouth and hit himself in the stomach.
Period drama is peak foley. “It’s great in terms of sound: there’s so much to get our teeth into in those creaky environments.” They do sometimes get to come out of the studio, to record in real stately homes. Fantasy is fun, too. They’ve just finished doing a series called The Wheel of Time, an adaptation of Robert Jordan’s epic novels, which Amazon is hoping will be the next Game of Thrones. Lots of armour, blood and guts.
Do they do much with watermelons? “There is this presumption that we spend all day smashing up watermelons,” Smyth says. But yes, they have been known to. There was a film called The Upside of Anger that had a shocking exploding-head scene and they smashed up a watermelon for that. “All the gloopy bits are brilliant for the sound of bits of brain hitting the floor and the wall. If you really need to up the ante you can get a pomegranate, slice it in half and gorge out the innards; it sounds like flesh, gooey with a bit of sinew in there. And celery is like bone crunching.”
They make happier noises of the flesh, too. Smyth kisses the back of his own hand. “You get into the mood, I’m kissing whoever is on screen, I’ve got to think about the angle and whether I’m kissing the neck or whatever.”
And it sometimes goes beyond kissing. They did a series called The Great, with Elle Fanning as Empress Catherine II and Nicholas Hoult as the Emperor Peter III, who were at it a lot. Smyth slaps his own upper arms rhythmically to give a flavour. “It’s just a job, I’m doing a sex scene. You break it down – I’m going to do the skin, I’m going to do the sheets – it’s an unremarkable thing.”
Right, quite enough of that. Time to get back to work, and to Bosworth in 1485. There’s still plenty of foley to add to the scene. After doing Richard’s horse, Smyth and Partridge need to go back through the scene several times to add the sounds of armour and reins, plus those of the other knights on the screen, their horses and standards. For the armour, Smyth wears a gauntlet (eBay, £18) which he rubs against his chain mail (an old butcher’s apron), while his other hand shakes Partridge’s favourite prop of all, a folding metal steamer basket. Again, he does this perfectly in time with Richard’s riding movements.
Now there are more hooves to add. It can’t be that hard; I need to have a go. I’ll do the hooves of one of the other horses, while Smyth does some armour jangling. I’m hitting the earth with the gaffer-taped discs, trying to keep in time with the horse on the screen. I’m thinking it sounds pretty good, perhaps a tiny bit uneven, but maybe I’ll get to go to the premiere, or get a credit at least … “Not for that horse you don’t,” Partridge says from his desk, “that drunk horse.” Smyth jumps aboard the mockery wagon. “A crazed horse, with BSE, just before it’s shot …”
Yeah, all right, I was only trying to help. I’m not sure horses even get BSE. But it’s possible my horse won’t make the final cut. Smyth and Partridge don’t get to go to a lot of premieres, anyway. They just send off what they’ve done and the director and the sound director pick and choose what they want of it.
As for the viewing public, they are mostly unaware that foley even exists; that there are people like Barnaby Smyth and Keith Partridge out there, smashing up watermelons. That’s OK with Smyth. “Not to be noticed is really the biggest compliment we can have.”
