Foley is the art of recording everyday sound effects in sync with picture, named after pioneering sound editor jack foley.
Foley artistry takes its name from Jack Foley, a Universal Studios sound editor who in the late 1920s and early 1930s developed techniques for adding live, custom sound effects in synchronisation with the projected image. Modern Foley artists work in specialised studios equipped with surfaces of every imaginable kind — gravel, hardwood, snow, broken glass — and a vast library of props. They re-create footsteps, fabric rustles, the click of a teacup, the creak of a chair, all of which the production microphone could not capture cleanly on set. The work is invisible by design: a good Foley track is one you never notice. Yet without it, every film would feel oddly hollow. Walter Murch's sound design for 'Apocalypse Now' (1979) and Skip Lievsay's work for the Coen brothers are studied as masterpieces of an art that exists, paradoxically, to disappear into the picture.