I have booked foley room today to collect some sounds. I have a list of sounds that I think I will need. I am going in with the ethos found in the pinewood studio, that gathering more than necessary to provide myself with more ‘ammunition’ in the mix, is the way to go.

Because I am redoing the sound to the opening scenes of La Haine, the majority of the sounds I will need to gather today are impacts, footsteps, fabric rustles and misc. shouting and screaming etc.

I chose to use a Zoom H5 to record sounds today, as it is an easy way to get great quality, stereo recordings. I know I could use better mics/preamps, but I will be distorting and filtering the sounds heavily in the mix, to fit the archival footage it will be on top of.

I had great fun recording! It was a fantastic way to allow my imagine to be flexible and try to create the necessary sounds out of the objects at hand.

I got different raw impact sounds by dropping different objects of different materials onto carpet and stone. These included; a mop bucket (sometimes filled with stone, glass and other metal objects), wooden planks, bricks, water bottles and any other object I could find.

To recreate the sound of fire, I recorded the rustling of some tape, some plastic bags, and some bubble wrap. I felt the bubble wrap had a nice low end to it that can definitively add to the realism of a fire sound. I think these could all be layered quite well in the mix.

Footsteps were quite simple to record, as I had 2 different pairs of shoes with me. I used the stone flooring in the foley room and stepped, jumped and shuffled around for a few minutes to get loads of variations. I will then chop and sync these later.

Finally today, I recorded a plethora of different screams and shouts. I put the H5 to one side of the room, and shouted and screamed in a French sounding accent using different pitches and tones of voice, for around 7 minutes. I am not too concerned about discernability of these noises as they will be heavily affected in the mix.

I still have quite a bit of field recording to do, and a few more foley sounds, but these can be done over this week!