The Foley Artist's Room

The punch landed and you felt it in your chest. You were watching a screen. There was no impact anywhere near you. The sound pressure wave that reached your ears was generated in a quiet studio by someone who was not punching anyone — someone who may have been snapping a leather glove against a rolled towel, or pressing a fist into a damp chamois cloth, or any one of a dozen improvised solutions to the same problem: how do you make an audience feel a blow that exists only as light on a surface? The answer is: you do not record what actually happens. You build the feeling from scratch. A Foley artist works in a studio with a screen on one wall and a floor covered in different surfaces — gravel, sand, a patch of hardwood, wet grass, tile. There are shelves of objects: shoes of every type, crockery, metal pipes, cloth, dry leaves, a coconut shell.