Foley in Sholay?

I finally figured out what “foley” stands for in the list of film credits. It is simply recreating sounds in creative ways that production mikes miss in the actual shooting. It is one of the most interesting aspects of movie making according to me. Steven Spielberg ones remarked that sound tells more than half of the story in a movie. But foley artists look at the world of sound effects in totally unique way. Rather than recreate the sound by recreating the action what caused it, they look for other similarly sounding events. For eg: in the oscar winning movie Terminator 2, the methods used were:

Bullets hitting T-1000
For the sound of the bullets hitting T-1000 Gary Rydstrom(foley artist) slammed an inverted glass into a bucket of yoghurt, getting a hard edge to accompany the goop

The sound of the crushed skull
The sound of the crushed skull is actually a pistachio beeing crunched by a metal plate.

Read the full interview here for more details. I’m sure this is an area in Bollywood which is catching up as seen in some movies. Imagine sholay being reshot which realistic sounding gunfire and trains! I would definitely like to work in this area
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On my personal front, Archie (Archana) surprised me yesterday by “appearing” in the Bangalore DC. I was dumbstruck according to eye witnesses :). Well, later I met her friends Vidya and Hema. The former is her best friend in every sense of the word. We had lunch and seems, finally, I’ll have a contact in Bangalore who is quite aware of what’s hot and what’s not over here.

The guest house folks though always friendly and nice, have started pestering me with the strange half monthly payment thing. Their legendary averseness to cheques (they sent someone along with my roommate to convert his SBI cheque to cash!) is another headache. Well, looks like I’ve made lot of friends out here in the guest house. The most important of them are Anmol, Alok, Dhiraj and Ram (who are Samarth’s friends) and of course my roommate, Shiv. Would you believe that we talk for hours till 1 am most of the days? Well, we talk about a lot of stuff including his 7 year stint in US, films and of course game programming. That sums up the last couple of days, I guess.