Welcome back!! Sure I am saying this more to myself than anyone else. But who would have thought that I would miss just rambling to myself via the Internet. Maybe blogging really is for me…

Anyway, I have returned from my adventurous Spring Break where I went back to the palace to see the King and the Queen and get new royal attire and I may have jumped out of an airplane as well, no carpet necessary (sorry Jasmine).

It seems only fitting that this princess would take on the king of sound effects, Foley. The best way to describe Foley sound effects is to see it. Watch the video, it’s insane. Talk about being in shape! I really enjoyed the challenge behind this, and I knew as usual I needed to come up with a process (typical math-thinker response).

So first off I had to figure out what part of the famous movie I needed to do. Being a true American princess I was born on July 5th. So I had the first 30 seconds of this video. So for starters I watched the video at three different times so that I got a new perspective on each movement and wrote down a list of sounds that I needed to produce.

Here’s what I ended up with:

• Person running on hay
• Horse running on hay
• 2 steps on a wooden staircase
• Door opening and closing
• Walking on wood
• Heavy lion breathing
• Tip toe on the wood
• Push on the door
• Hand feeling the wood
• Wood sliding down and locking
• Lion breathing

Now it was time to produce them, you can read about what I did below, but here are the sounds I came up with.

Since I am most certainly not a farm girl, I didn’t have any hay laying around. So I decided to walk on paper instead to be the person. Then, I used a boot that I had to imitate the sound of the horse running. From there, I jumped to running on the wooden floor and used my door to slam shut. I used my own breathe to be the lion and tried to keep it going since the lion is breathing the whole time. To use the tip-toe I had a nice squeaky part to my floor that I was using, it’s a good thing I was not in this situation, since my ankles click a lot (which you can hear it click one time, I did a lot of takes to try to get it to not click but it wasn’t gonna happen). Finally, I used a drawer to have the wood sliding down, and crinkled things on my dresser for the pocket rustling, which ended up getting cut out since it wasn’t in the 30 seconds of the video.

The problem now was the recording part and what I would use in order to record it. I decided on having my iPhone on the dresser that I was using which is right next to my room. My computer has a tendency of picking up unwanted noises because it is very loud. So used my phone (the voice memo app) and emailed it to myself. Since this was in an mp3 file, I used this website to convert it into a wav file. Since I started recording before I started making my sound effects, I used Audacity to take out the dead air to make sure it was exactly 30 seconds. Of course, the perfectionist in me kicked in and I used the zoom tool to make sure I was at 30.0 seconds and no more or less.

Overall, I was really happy with what I ended up with. My roommates may not have been too thrilled about me running around the apartment slamming doors in the morning, but it was for school so they will just have to understand. I went through about 5 different takes, and thought that the timing of this one was the best. Ironically, it was my first take. I guess the less thought you put into something the better it can be.

Thanks for reading!

Princess Karissa