Made By Other People.

Jurassic Park.

On the 19^th of October we held a screening of our most recent work at Toronto’s Cinecycle (which is a bike shop by day, screener of movies – typically 8mm – by night). Before we started the feature presentation I had the distinct pleasure of attempting, with the help of some enthusiastic volunteers, to do a Foley Fridays Karaoke session live.

If you don’t know what Foley Fridays Karaoke is – I basically take away all of the sound/dialogue from a scene of a film and recreate it on the spot. The spot usually being my living room. This time I had a theatre and 7 other people to recreate the sound/dialogue for me. The film? Jurassic Park, of course.

Everyone did an impressive job – considering they had no time to figure out how to make the sounds they were asked to make, using the props they were just given. Even the entire audience was used to create the sound of the rain storm in the scene by snapping their fingers and hitting their thighs. Most importantly I think (hope) everyone had a great time doing it. The rest of the Made By Other People agreed that it help make the night just that much more special.Though, if I had one thing to do over again I would set up a better micing system as some great sounds were made but just weren’t picked up by the microphones.

Thanks again to the volunteers, the audience, Cinecycle and the T-Rex for saving our asses from those Raptors (almost too conveniently) at the very last minute.

To see past Foley Fridays Karaoke go to the Foley Fridays section of the website here.

The End.

When I first heard the last chord of The Beatles’ A Day In The Life I immediately thought that it sounded as close to the end of the world as a song can get. I’m not saying that was their explicit intention but it just sounds like the musical equivalent everything imploding.  I’ve thought this so much that when 5 years ago when I needed to make an explosion sound representing the end of a world I played that chord on a piano and mixed it underneath the sound of an atomic bomb exploding. That’s what’s playing above (my apologies for the less than stellar quality). If you don’t hear the chord (E Major) right away listen again – it’s definitely floating in there.

But why am I writing about the end? Mostly because this is the last Foley Friday.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything in a while and to be honest I can’t see me wanting to in the future so I’m going to end things here. I’ve got a few ideas for future ongoing projects plus the ‘Karaoke” I’ve been doing monthly will keep going and return soon. This decision also comes from our plan to redesign the site into something that won’t exactly support weekly blog posts. Something that, I think, is for the better.

I want to thank those of you that have read even one of these posts in the past, and especially those of you that have read numerous posts. I hope you were on occasion entertained and were able to learn something new over the course of the year and three quarters of Fridays featuring foley. I think I did.

Thanks again, nothing coming next week.