A couple of months ago, when we were discussing the history of SFX recording in this space, we talked briefly about Jack Foley, the old-time Hollywood sound expert whose name has become synonymous with realistic effects recording for feature films and television. So-called "foley recording" is also the basis of most commercial sound effects libraries.

Recently I had the opportunity to discuss the craft with one of the top foley artists in the industry, Marnie Moore, whose credits include a slew of major and independent films, including Jurassic Park, The Sixth Sense, Chocolat, Adaptation, Galaxy Quest, Lost In Translation, The Village, Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, and many, many others. I first met her more than a year ago when I was working on a music project at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, Calif., and she and her foley partner Margie O'Malley were cutting foley for Carroll Ballard's film Duma in an adjoining room. Talking with her that day, I was struck by how hard foley artists have to work and by the incredible variety inherent in the job. Each film has different foley requirements—whether it's car door slams, saddle creaks, footsteps on leaves, or wood on metal. Foley artists are, by necessity, sound experts who understand the subtleties and textural properties of materials and, working closely with engineers, know how to capture those qualities on tape or, more likely these days, digital media.

Moore actually got her professional start in the music business, working as an assistant in various San Francisco Bay Area recording studios (she grew up in Marin County), then becoming a full-fledged engineer. One of those studios, Russian Hill Recording, attracted a considerable amount of independent film soundtrack work and Moore slowly found herself gravitating in that direction. Through her work at Russian Hill, Moore met Dennie Thorpe, whom Moore calls "the leading foley person in the Bay Area at the time." Moore says, "I started helping her out, doing little things mostly. A year later I left the music business and went to apprentice for her, mostly working at Fantasy and Skywalker; we shlepped her props back and forth. I worked with Dennie for about 4 1/2 years, and it was both scary and amazing because she was working on some really big films—the second film I ever worked on was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, so I was terrified.

"I really didn't know what I was doing but Dennie was incredibly supportive and she taught by example mostly. I learned by watching her. She has an incredible attention to detail. The qualities a foley artist must have are the ability to focus on the here and now, kind of like a musician, because it's really a performance in realtime. You have to have very, very good hand-eye coordination. You also have to have that kind of personality, similar to a recording engineer personality, where you can put up with a lot of crap with a smile on your face, because there's a lot of pressure in the business and there are people with strong personalities that you have to deal with sometimes, so you have to be as accommodating as you can manage to be.

"I've always been very interested in materials and I'm very mechanically inclined, so I understand the relationship between size and weight, and I've always been very observant of materials that things are made of and what they might sound like. You need to be a keen observer and listener and you really have to know your materials."

Foley artists also tend to be inveterate junk collectors, finding sonic gold in trash and the strangest objects imaginable. "Oh yes, that's true," Moore laughs. "We're always looking for things that squeak or clank or make springy, sproingy noises. If you go to a swap meet or garage sale, you're always putting your ear up to things and listening. The weirdest thing is when you listen to things in the grocery store—tap on vegetables and rustle them and crunch them a little; I always try not to call too much attention to myself when I'm doing that. Dennie once went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of fruit that was way past its prime and the cashier says to her, 'You know, we have much better fruit than this. I really don't want you to buy this rotten fruit,' and Dennie was saying, 'No, no, I really want the rotten fruit!'"

When Moore started working in foley, sounds were cut usually to mag film, generally backed up on 24-track. At Fantasy, they preferred working on multitrack tape. Now, of course, Digidesign's Pro Tools is the medium of choice nearly everywhere. What hasn't changed, Moore says, are the microphones: She always likes to record with Klaus Heyne-modified Neumann U 87s. "The preamp was modified so they're much higher output," Moore says, "so we can record tiny cloth that's very quiet without getting too much noise. I've been using them for years and years and they're fabulous. We use those up here [in the Bay Area]; I think in Southern California they use more shotgun mics. We have a little bit of our own style here.

"We often use two mics—one close and one far away—to get two perspectives on a sound at the same time. Different engineers have their preferences of whether they like closer sounds better, and of course it depends on the shot."

As for her own preferences in the types of films she works on, Moore notes, "I particularly like to do independent films because I generally like the films better. But something like A River Runs Through It was wonderful because we got to do these beautiful fly fishing sounds. This was back when Dennie and I were working at the original Skywalker foley stage, which was this huge room. We borrowed a really nice fly fishing reel from one of the editors on the show and I would run across this carpeted floor in my stocking feet pulling out the reel and Dennie would hold onto it and we got these great zinging sounds by recording a closeup on the reel. I guess I was the fish," she laughs.

Working on indie films does have one drawback: The budgets are invariably smaller. Moore says, "Unfortunately, not everyone has realistic expectations. If you're working on a low-budget movie with someone who's really experienced, that's the best situation because they know what they can use and what they can't use and they know how much time it's going to take to do what I need to do and how much time they can give me. We work as a team and we figure out how to get the best sound possible for the smallest amount of money. But sometimes that's not the case. You'll have people who aren't very experienced and they'll want you to do full-coverage foley in five days on a feature-length film. They don't understand that foley can be fairly slow and tedious. So then they start backpedaling and trying to cut corners. It can be tough.

"But," she concludes, "it's so inspiring to be part of a really good film, regardless of the budget. I really do love my work."