The foley production role within the film petal child was assigned to me. I worked with Yuan to create the foley for the film and we had to wait for the final version of the visual edit to be able to begin our job. To start the process, we watched the entire visual edit, scene by scene and noted down each point in which foley sound was needed. This process took about two hours for the 40 min film.
Once we had the sounds written down on paper, we began to record them. My role for this was to be the recordist, whilst Yuan was the “walker”. Scene by scene, we went through and recorded the sounds. The first scene consisted of a bar, so we produced sounds that imitated the sounds of glasses being put down, drinking, change being given to the bar man, the actresses sitting down etc.
In doing this for our first time, it took a lot of takes and practice to get the right sounds and aesthetics for each recording that fit the film. It took Yuan and I about 5 or 6 hours to fully finish the foley for it ready for Jack to mix in the final session.
The areas in which we struggled most were the timings of the footsteps. For example, in the end scene where all the actresses walk outside, the footsteps were way to many to be able to make sound professional, with the equipment and time that we had been set to do the job, and also, the footsteps were in fact audible on the film itself, so adding more began to seem nonsensical. The actresses were also talking over the footstep noise, and so changing the sound too much would have a negative impact on the quality of the dialogue.