Did you know that most of the sounds you hear in a movie on TV are made in post-production? Dialogue tends to be recorded on location and sound recordists try to capture the ambient noises, but they don't always manage to capture everything.
Yes, most of the sounds of footsteps, rain, fire and gun shots are recorded by the foley artists. They get their name from the pioneer of film sound recording, Jack Foley. These artists have their own studios where they project edited film on a projector and record sounds into scenes where they are needed - often using ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking.
In documentaries, it's a little different. Most sounds are recorded on the spot right along with the video footage, for authenticity. However, it also happens to us that for some footage we need to record a sound effect in post-production. For example, if it was a very windy day when we were planting potatoes - we didn't have a pole microphone that day and everything was recorded on the camera's internal microphone (we were under-equipped at the beginning of the shoot).
Therefore, to improve the sound quality and better viewer enjoyment, we needed to record a large number of sounds to add to the film where they were needed.
We hope you learned something new! So next time you go to the cinema, be sure to look out for Foley artists in the credits!
On behalf of the "Garden of Eden" film team,
Michal