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I want to start practicing foley walking, since it's been a while since i did it.... (And being able to do it for short projects wouldn't hurt either)
I was thinking of using suitcases, but they might take to much space, since the studio i'm interning in isn't huge.
Also did some googling and these look cool and can be stacked on top of each other. Has anybody tried this? Do they sound good enough? (as subjective as that is) Or any other ideas?
Thanks!
I started like this and what I did was I built shallow empty casings out of soft wood and put carpet in the bottom. I also put 1/2 inch hard rubber around the edges to help with minimizing any potential boxy sound. The casings were about 4 inches deep- quite shallow. I used these mainly for gravel, snow, grass, sand etc. The hard surfaces were really tough as concrete needs to be embedded and thick to prevent ringing. It helped in the beginning on small projects but nothing beats a proper studio. To practice walking, I used to follow people and imitate their footsteps- weight, rhythm etc to understand texture. I also listened alot to the sound of people as they walked so I could translate this in studio.
Good luck
I've tried this myself, and I personally found that it's OK for particulate matter - dirt, grit, gravel - but for solid surfaces, the tones are wrong if the surface area is too small and the surfaces aren't really, deeply embedded into the ground, especially for stone sounds where the resonance matters a fair amount. But for any lot of other surfaces it can be darned handy to have something on that kind of scale that you can move around.
The best thing to do if you are having problems in the studio is to try and do it on location.
Depends on where you are geographically, but recording at 2am with a H4, good shotgun mic, windpack and an IPOD (for video replay) I have got some of the best ever sounds needed without the problems of recording inside.
From my past experiences of recording footsteps on makeshift stages I often got resonances bleeding from the studio floor that gave me horrible boxiness. The only real way was to elevate the foley pit which gave a little rise to the sounds being a little thin. If you havn't got the time to build a proper foley pit, I would suggest my initial tip. If you don't have a budget for that, work with what you have got, but be prepared for a lot of re-recording and filtering.
