What’s that noise?! Seattle Foley artists bring life to movies and video games

A new, locally produced, video game called Never Alone features a girl and a fox on a journey through snowy Alaska. But this is what’s actually making the sound of a fox trotting through snow.

“We have this glove here, taped paperclips onto the fingertips,” says Seattle Foley artist, Jamie Hunsdale, who then danced the paperclips across a frozen pizza.

“It makes a great sound because it’s frozen, it’s a little bit hollow, sounds like you’re walking on ice. Plus, the little pieces of frozen cheese that skip off to the sides really add the extra ‘walking in the snow, walking on ice,’ sort of sounds.”

Jamie, AKA Foley Rambo, is a Seattle Foley artist who does sound for video games, movies and some commercials. And in case you’re unfamiliar with Foley, Jamie’s business partner at Impossible Acoustic, sound designer Brendan Hogan, explains:

“What’s recorded on set is just the dialogue, and pretty much everything else you hear in the movie is added in later,” Brendan says. “The Foley sounds are things like people walking, the sounds of their clothes, the sounds of them handling different things in the real world.”

Like the sound of someone walking on grass.

“Grass is pretty quiet in its natural state,” Jamie says. “But if you take an old cassette tape and pull out all the guts, get all the tape out of it, make a nice little pile, maybe sprinkle a little dirt on it, and then you walk on the inside of a cassette tape, it sounds more like grass than grass does.”

A lot of the audio recipes, as they call them, are cooked up from items found around the house.

“Squeezing a box of good old cornstarch,” Jamie says, squeezing the box until it squeaks, “That sounds like walking in the snow a little bit, right?”

Jamie and Brendan go out on recording field trips, and for their latest project they drove deep into the mountains in search of snow.

“For Never Alone, the game, we really had to make the snow a character. There are so many kinds of snow, supposedly there are 50 kinds of snow in the world. We had to go and get crunchy snow, icy snow, soft snow, deep snow, because it played a key part in the storytelling of the game.”

For the game, they were tasked with creating a sound for Alaska’s Northern Lights.

“How do you make the sounds for the Northern lights? Some people actually claim they can hear the Northern lights. They do make a sound, it’s like a clicking sound. We wanted to make it a little more magical than that. That sound is a mixture of all my voice, humming, whistling and and then just going, ‘Haaaaaaa!’ [It’s] heavily processed, so listening to the finished product you’d probably never guess what the original ingredients are,” said Brendan.

And they don’t want people to know how the sounds are made. It takes away the magic.

“One of our rules when working with directors is never to tell them how we made the sounds,” Brendan says. “All these stories we’re sharing with you now, we never share with the directors. Because once you know where a sound comes from that sort of pollutes your idea of what it sounds like. Even when we’re recording, often times I prefer not to see what Jamie’s doing so I can just judge it purely based on the sound. Free of any bias of knowing where the sound came from. Oftentimes I’ll turn around and be like, ‘Oh my God, that sound came from a toilet paper roll?'”

Sometimes he turns around and sees a lot more than he bargained for.

“Sometimes I have to take my pants off because my pants make so much noise,” Jamie confesses. “We’ve done everything from that to somebody’s getting drowned. I’ll get a bucket and I’ll stick my head in the bucket and scream underwater.”

As a Foley artist you basically play every character in a film or game.

“I’m really good at walking in high heels, I really am,” Jamie humble-brags. “You know, that’s another kind of footstep and that was a process to learn.”

For the record, he wears a size 14 in heels. I asked Jamie and Brendan what sound was hard for them to create.

“In the game there’s a character who walks on spirits. What does the sound of footsteps on a spirit sound like? I think we went through 10 different ideas at least. We tried walking on a dart board, I remember that. I think we went through 10 different ideas at least. One idea was that it made musical notes, but that was kind of distracting and annoying. But we ended up with, of course, the simplest thing which was just punching a pillow. It doesn’t make much sound, it’s a really quiet sound in the game. But that’s the thing. You don’t notice it but when it’s gone you miss it.”

For the video game, Brendan and Jamie created 3,000 to 4,000 different sounds over the course of about 10 months and, like a sausage factory, sometimes you don’t want to see how they got made.

“Balancing on piles of rusty metal, climbing up and jumping off of things,” Jamie says, describing some of their field trips.

“Jamie loves breaking things and doing things dangerously,” says Brendan. “I’m always the one who’s like, ‘Dude you don’t have to break that.’ And he’s like, ‘Too late! It’s broken!’

“Do you have insurance?” I asked Jamie.

“Uhhh, kind of.”