Monday 16th October
This week, we had to get ready to choose a film we were going to do foley for. Jessica had sent a list of movies, but I was interested in finding my own choice different from the ones shown. One I am drawn to is American Psycho (2000), but after reviewing the section I was thinking of doing foley for, I may have to rethink my option.
Directed by Mary Harron, American Psycho follows Patrick Bateman, a wealthy Investment Banker who has a tendency to kill. After meeting with his associates and discussing business cards, he envies Paul Allen’s card and decides to kill a homeless man and his dog because of it.
Later on, Bateman kills Allen and various others from sex workers to police officers, culminating in him being uncertain if the murders were real or imaginary, as he was was told that Allen had lunch with someone in London after he had ‘killed’ him and his secretary discovered his journal filled with graphic drawings of his ‘murders’.
I chose this many for the opening scene where Bateman has a monolog about his daily routine, as I was going to recreate the sounds of his routine using foley, but I believe it is a bit too short to work with.
I dabbled in the idea of using a game. Not much thought went into it, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
The first game I thought of was Until Dawn, a 2015 interactive horror game developed by Supermassive Games. I was thinking about the ending of the game where a group of young people are trying to escape a cabin but monsters are also around so they have to stay silent.
The second choice was watchdogs 2, a open world action-adventure game by Ubisoft. While doing Spatialisation work, I was looking into multi channel works. I found sound hour, a multi channel installation in San Francisco, focusing on iconic landmarks and nature sounds. Watchdogs 2 takes place in San Francisco, so I was going to try and capture those sounds in game as well as just natural ambience, and dub over them using foley and field recordings.
The last game I looked at was Watchdogs: Legion. While looking at 2, I remembered that Legion is set in London, so it made sense to just do a game that is set here because I could get more ‘authentic’ recordings.
While I think these are great ideas, I thought that it would be best to stick with a film. I landed on Don’t Breathe, a 2016 horror-thriller film directed by Fede Álvarez. I will discuss it more in my proposal.