Making Of Edward – The Foleyart Instrument

Recording and editing 25.000 sounds takes a while and that’s why we have started with the production of Edward in April 2014. We had long nights and spend many weekends on the Foleystage, trying wich are the best perspectives, shoes or microphones to use.

Edwards idea is to have a virtual Foley to help out when it comes to deadlines or when the budget have no space for real Foley recordings. Picking Footsteps out of libraries is a lot of work and sounds kind of unnatural.

“It’s not easy to create a library that’s as flexible as an actual Foley Artist. No library can replace real Foley, but with Edward you can get some incredible results.”

Perspektive Recording

Every sound was recorded simultaneously in two distances. Hitting a key triggers two samples. A close and a distance recording of the same sound witch can be mixed together to fit best the picture.

Why Kontakt?

Kontakt is an industry standard and comes with many great features. The most important things for a Foleyart instrument are to preserve the natural sound and to be easy to handle. Kontakt comes with the ability to randomize sound in a way we find very suitable for footsteps. That means hitting the same key twice, Edward never plays the same sample in a row. Instead, it’ll play the sample that followed – and after a left step it will automatically play the next real right step.
Also Kontakt’s own compression file format ‘.ncw’ is great for handling 800 sounds per patch in this high quality, even on smaller machines.
We were thinking to make a standalone plugin, but that would have increase our production costs much and Edward would cost around 300$. We’re sure this is the better way for all. If you don’t know Kontakt, have a look on the Native Instruments site and you’ll see that it’ll bring lots of useful sounds and tools for post production and sound design especially the ultimate bundle.

Recording Equipment

After many tests of several microphones we ended up using a Neumann U87 for the close perspective and mostly the Schoeps CM for the distance positions. To get them in time we corrected the delay in post.

We recorded with a Studer Console which adds a beautiful soft natural sound. In difficult situations like barefoot on concrete the SPL Transient Designer hardware were very useful.

Many thanks go to..

Lothar Segeler, CEO Post Production Studio SoundVision
André Norman, Art Director Colightning
Stefan Lampadius, Actor

all helping hands
Fabian Mielke, Dipl.-Ing
David Schmidt, Dipl.- Audio Engineer SAE
Miriam Siebigteroth, Dipl.-Komm.-Designer
Holger Schneider, SAE Alumni
Andreas Herrmann, Audio Engineer SAE

..all Foley Artists I could convince to help!

MORE INFO ABOUT EDWARD