How This Woman Creates God of War’s Sound Effects | Obsessed | WIRED

These are actually just toilet plungers. Thank you. Meet Joanna Fang, Foley artist for PlayStation Studios and a master at sonically translating our world through works like God of War Ragnarok. Let's step into my office. Just watch your step. I love my office. This is my creative space. This is the Sony PlayStation Foley Studio. We have tons of really cool stuff. We have like smashed iPhones. So you know if we need to like throw something behind our shoulders it sounds accurate to what an iPhone sounds like. We have all sorts of weird props and things of that nature. There's a saying in foley that is never trust a clean foley stage. My whole life I've been trained as a classical musician. I'm kind of always passively listening to things and passively recording in a weird way. If I were to sum up all the times my body reacts, like, oh, that could be a Foley, or, oh, that's a cool prop. I think I'm thinking about Foley 13 hours a day to focus on all these other characters, and literally to walk in their footsteps, to walk in their shoes. Everything else melts away. Like, you don't exist anymore. If you take this Indian paring knife and you pair it up with a torque wrench, you get the sound of, like, an assault rifle. You know, you just kind of, like, shake it. Using lump charcoal for snow. It's got like all the cracking characters of ice. Pistol holster. Add manicotti shells to it. You can get a really comprehensive bone break. Gory, viscera sounds. We have to do our best to divorce where these props are from and where we could take them. Like I can imagine this sitting on the back of a horse. Fully at its best is painting a scene with sound. It's not bad today. I don't know. What we'll do is we'll sometimes take this and pair it against the wood right here. So if we have these dramatic doors that have like creaks on them, I always say that the best props are ones that you play like a Stradivarius. Like they just sing. It's like weaponized ASMR, you know what I mean? Like we're trying to get the audience to feel something. These textures can completely change how we view a scene. So we gave Joanna a clip she had never seen before and asked her to foley it as an action movie and as a romantic comedy. So in the clip, there's a certain cadence going on with her footsteps. In terms of textures, I obviously see that she's got a leather jacket, what appears to be two baguettes underneath her arms. Just judging by the way her legs are spiking, I'm going to go ahead and say that she's probably wearing heels. Let me reinterpret the scene as if it were like a romantic comedy. Her leather jacket, if it were a rom-com, probably wouldn't creak that much. It's just, you know, regular leather jacket. We'll do the baguette first as if just normal baguette, right? So if this is a rom-com, she probably has these standard-issue keys, maybe like a wallet or something. Okay, let's just let's just be creative. Maybe she's an assassin. The baguettes are actually a cover. We have these heels. They're a little darker Let's grit up the floor too, you know, just a little bit because heels kind of over accentuate grit So these are now the same exact clip visually, but sonically we've adjusted the foley to accommodate for two different types of genres Everyone wears leather in games, so we have four or five different leather jackets. If a character is like a little bit evil, maybe a little tense, we want to give that character that sonic texture. This is our giant water pit. It's actually one of the first things built into the foundations of the room. It's an incredible feature and it's not something you see every day. Cardboards are an amazing prop. Kind of gross. But sometimes you're able to get it to like... You know, get, like, some funny little characteristics tweak, so someone's, like, sliding down, like, a glass window. We're just so rigged up to hear, like... Joanna's love of Foley runs deep, and she's always looking to educate people on her craft. People tend to misunderstand Foley as if it were purely forensic recording. I think most people would be very surprised if they were to go to a foley stage with the exact props used on set, the exact setups, almost in a pure objective way recreating the sounds. They'll find that the foley that comes from that is extremely lacking of all the things that we've come to expect from a game or a film. I remember the most challenging sound that I had to do. It was the simplest sound effect and it broke me. It was like Whoopi Goldberg was like sauntering up to a bar. It just went to take 8, take 9, take 10, and it was just killing me. I think the reason why I was having such a hard time with that cue was just I didn't feel right in my body, you know? I used Foley for so long as this like perfect art form that helped me shake off, frankly, my gender dysphoria. For some... Frickin' reason, that one cue made me hate everything about myself. So not long after that I actually came out of the closet because I was like, it got to the point where I couldn't, I couldn't do my job anymore. This is my entire array of shoes, well not really, this is a third of my shoe collection. Dress shoes, heavy boots, men's athletic wear, the squeakiest pairs of shoes you've ever heard in your life. So sometimes I don't even wear them for shoes, sometimes I use them as props. This is like my fun little arsenal. A farmer friend of mine built these for me and they're made out of aircraft aluminum. They were tuned for a while, they've had their fair share of use. They resonate in ways that you don't naturally normally get with real swords because of their construction. All of these props and tools can come together in creating a deep and layered scene. To demonstrate this, we've asked Joanna to recreate a segment of the barroom fight scene from God of War Ragnarok. One of the concepts in the scene that I really fell in love with was setting up and paying off this bouncer. Weapons aren't allowed inside. We'll have to check them. All right, Blake, can you queue me up for this sword off the back here? Here we go. Cool, ready. Can I just get a sweetener of the blades, like, swooshing a little bit after she grabs it? And then Atreus here also gets his weapons. We finally get to the middle of the scene where all that setup pays off. Atreus, he's forced off the second story by the bouncer and the bouncer grabs him and tries to get him to stop. My favorite sound in Bar Brawl is the sound of leather as Atreus is struggling to break the grasp of the bouncer. If Atreus doesn't hit that button enough, the character dies and it's game over. We got the strangulation sound of twisting leather and the clank of armor as the bouncer's trying to get him to hold still. We do have actual armor. I'm going to hit the pillars now. When you smash that button enough, Mjolnir, the hammer comes flinging through the air, crushes the guy's skull, and we go straight into picking up Thor and walking him out. After he's got his head knocked off, let's just get that sound of his body just going like, relaxing back. Okay, cool. So, head smash. We're going to get real, real gross, real fast with this one. Manicotti shells, bone breaks. This is an Axe Blank that our friend Jeff provided for the Foley stage. Blake's gonna record it and we're gonna reverse and flip it. It's gonna get processed and added with a bunch of different sounds and it's gonna make up Thor's hammer. Hey Blake, if you don't mind, can we just play back like everything all together at once? Awesome! On a sequence as complicated as Bar Brawl, we're creating over a thousand assets easy. If you can imagine, moments like these happen throughout the entire game. Foleying a game takes months and months and months because of the sheer density, attention to detail, and contextual storytelling that we have to do on the foley stage. Joanna's mastery of her craft is unique, and even in the digital age, she feels the role of a Foley artist is still vital to storytelling. I can imagine a future where machine learning aids us in Foley, but I do not ever believe that it will take away the simple and beautiful performative nature of it. I've often felt like when you watch a film and there isn't much Foley, it feels like you're staring through a window. It doesn't feel like you're actually there. Foley to me is a very powerful performance art language that connects the audience with the characters and gets you to feel what they're going through.