WOODY: I often prefer to work with Foley artists than to have to search through my sound effects library and layer and create and edit sounds. Many times it’s better and faster and more creative to do it with a Foley artist.
MONIQUE: It’s so weird. People get so cheap when it comes to Foley and they think, oh I can just cut that, but they don’t realize the time it takes to cut something like that that’s multi-dimensional and nuanced. It takes quite awhile as opposed to we can do it in a matter of seconds.
WOODY: So how did you get into Foley in the first place?
MONIQUE: I was very fortunate. It was accidental. I had been doing art department work and I knew that was not where I wanted to end up. It seemed like a lot of moving furniture to me and I didn’t want to be a production designer. I couldn’t really see it going beyond the dreaded furniture moving that I was doing. So, I thought I wanted to get into picture editing. I was at a party and I met someone and he said he was in post and I thought that meant that he was a picture editor. I didn’t know anything, I thought that post was picture editing. And I said, “oh I’ve always wanted to do post.” And he said actually he was in post sound. And I said “oh, I’ve always wanted to do that.” I just went along with it. He said he actually recorded Foley and I said you know, that has always been interesting to me because I’d seen the LA Times trailer [shown during the pre-show of film screenings which depicted various crew positions in motion pictures] they had a few years ago and it did look interesting. So the guy called me a couple of days later and he said “we’ve been trying to train somebody and it’s been about a month now and he’s just not getting it so we’re auditioning people. Would you like to come in?” So myself, along with about ten lucky others, all had a chance to come in and try to walk footsteps in sync or move a piece of cloth. Nothing real taxing or complicated, but just to see if you could hit sync with what was being projected. They picked me and ironically I worked for them for about a month before the purchase of their building fell through and thus, their foley stage went along with it. And so I had about a month experience and I sent a resume saying that I was told that I had potential talent but I had very little experience.
I was really lucky. My timing was good and I met some very kind people who were willing to show me some things, which is extremely rare. There’s not that many of us, I think there’s maybe only a hundred Foley artists in the state [California], and the work isn’t long like editors who can work on movies for a year given the different budgets. But Foley artists, our job, even on a big budget thing, maybe get twenty days a month. So everything is very competitive and no one wants to teach anybody how to do what they do because then that person is going to be willing to do what they do for cheaper. It’s funny. It’s very, very difficult to break in to. It’s very, very competitive. No one wants to show anybody anything and I managed to get some people to show me some things and to hire me. I still am stunned. I don’t know quite what happened and I don’t think I realized how lucky I was at the time. I felt glad, I thought, this is cool, but I really didn’t know how truly lucky I was. I am glad I didn’t know how hard it was to break into. My naivete probably helped me along quite a bit. If I would have known how hard it is to get into foley I may have not thought it realistic. I meet people all the time that say they’d love to do Foley and I wish them well, but it’s very hard to break into.
WOODY: I get that question all the time. “Hey, I’d love to do Foley. Would you hire me?”
MONIQUE: I think part of the problem is schools, too. I met a kid a couple years ago who went to a recording school and his parents paid I think about a hundred grand in tuition for him to go to school there. And of course his parents were expecting that he would be able to come out here and get a forty or fifty dollar an hour job, which is what the school said would happen if they trained in this area. I’m not saying all schools are to blame, this is just an isolated story, but the poor kid came out here, he was doing an internship and making nothing, and the next level up from that he was maybe going to be making $8-$10 in the machine room somewhere. And he was super bummed because his parents kept asking him when he was going to make that big salary he had been led to believe he was going to get upon graduation.
I recently was on a judging panel for a paid internship that the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences holds. The person who receives the internship gets to work at a sound facility here in Los Angeles for a month or two. And it’s a paid internship, it’s not a huge amount of pay, but it’s still some pay. But they get the experience of that. There were maybe thirty applicants and we had to narrow it down to three. They have to write a letter explaining why they want to do the internship and what they hoped to gain. It’s really interesting. They get letters of recommendation from faculty and it’s just really interesting seeing what peoples’ ideas of what this business is and what’s going to be expected of them and what position they get to assume upon arrival. There’s, of course, a number of talented people coming from USC, but the panel also likes to give opportunities to people from other states where they don’t have a chance to meet people and make contacts the way they do out here. The exciting thing about it is there are a lot of bright talented foks out there that really are into sound, which is very cool. I don’t know that that was the case twenty years ago. I think people are a lot more educated about the importance of sound than they used to be. It used to be kind of an after thought, didn’t it?
WOODY: In many ways it still is. One of my rants is that people think sound for film and TV is just a technical job. They have no idea the amount of collaboration and creativity involved.
MONIQUE: And I don’t know if they’ve changed course, but it used to be AFI didn’t even teach sound. It’s weird, too, about that collaboration thing. I think that’s really huge as far as what we do in general. Editors have a tendency to work a lot by themselves, sound editors in front of a computer, but they’re still collaborating with the sound supervisor, with other editors on what the tone of the film is supposed to sound like so that there’s some continuity, and then with the dialog [editor] and with the mixer. All of these forces come together and it’s really a hugely collaborative effort. Every once in awhile I’ll meet somebody who is a Foley artist/recordist where they maybe have some way to push play from the stage, like they’ll have a little portable console and they’ll record themselves. And that’s like working in a vacuum. I would rather not do Foley at all than to work like that. The collaboration is what makes this really interesting.
WOODY: It also makes it better.
MONIQUE: Oh, so much better.