Foley/fisher/19″/mike1st/mark2nd

By SARA FISHER

Staff Reporter

Jeffrey Wilhoit and James Moriana, already dusty and tired from a day of concocting sounds for Hollywood movies, crouch in front of two microphones in an almost pitch-black room.

Wilhoit has a heavy jacket hoisted over his shoulder, and one foot on a pile of unspooled audiocassette tape and fake moss. Moriana leans over a table with boxing gloves on and has one foot hovering by a pile of gravel. The large movie screen in the front of the room flickers to life, silently playing a scene from Disney’s new animated feature, “Tarzan.” Precisely as the screen shows a gorilla crashing to the ground, Wilhoit slams the jacket over his shoulder and stomps on the unraveled cassette tape. Simultaneously, James pounds his boxing gloves on a table, and lightly kicks some gravel with his foot.

There is silence for a second. Then the screen goes blank, the lights flash on, and a disembodied voice floats into the studio. “Very nice. Let’s listen to that.” Sitting in the booth behind the studio, Foley mixer Nerses Gezalyan plays back what the two artists had just created: the realistic sound of a heavy animal hitting a jungle floor.

It’s mid-afternoon at Soundelux Entertainment Group’s Foley studio in Hollywood, which resembles a garage before the junk sale. Foam mattresses, an airplane wing, car doors, a toilet bowl, a dozen types of flooring, pieces of wire fencing, a gumball machine, and every type of chair and drinking glass imaginable crowd the windowless, soundproof room.

As Foley artists, Wilhoit and Moriana use the props and their imaginations to create sound effects synchronized to a movie or TV show after it has been shot. It’s just one of the many steps that a film must go through in post-production, but it’s almost unparalleled in terms of zany artistry. (The term Foley is derived from Jack Foley, who invented the technique while working at Universal.)

Wilhoit and Moriana, who have worked together for 14 years and are considered one of the top Foley teams in the business, root around the studio for their next set of props as Gezalyan cues up the next movie scene.

“If these poor plants only knew what we did for a living, they’d have cried out ‘No, not me, no’ when we got them at the nursery,” says Wilhoit, opting to gather thick handfuls of artificial palm fronds rather than the wilted real plant. Brandishing two machetes, Moriana adds in a wicked tone, “They looked so good when we first got them. What happened?”

Wearing sweat pants, T-shirts, soft-soled shoes and workmen’s gloves (clothes that won’t rustle), the two position themselves in front of microphones. Gezalyan quietly says over the intercom, “Here you go.” The room goes dark and the clip rolls. On the mark, which is shown by a white line in the film moving across the screen, Moriana delicately draws the two knives against each other and Wilhoit shakes his foliage against the ground. The playback has an animal’s claws swiping through vines to ring sharply against rock.

The lights come on. No one is satisfied.

“That was too long, way too long,” Moriana says, referring to the scrape of his machetes. Gezalyan agrees from the booth, “It may need something more, too. A bigger sound.”

There’s a quick conference in the sound booth, where they listen to the playback. “You know, when that paw hits the vine, it may be a good opportunity to get that swoosh sound in there again,” Wilhoit throws out.

He goes back into the studio, grabs long, delicate pieces of wood that resemble overgrown skewers, and swooshes them through the air like Zorro’s blade. Moriana does another couple of takes with his machetes until the sound is in synch with the swiping claw.

Onto the next scene. New props are gathered, and the room goes dark so artists can better see the nuances of what’s happening on screen. In the dark, Foley work can be hazardous. Today’s action is relatively tame, but the two men happily swap a few war stories. For car wrecks, Foley artists throw themselves around the stage in a crudely choreographed dance to replicate the ear-shattering sound of disaster.

“When we’re done, we can’t move since we’re usually trapped in a corner, surrounded by debris and broken glass after having totally trashed the place,” Wilhoit says.

After two hours of takes and retakes, the Foley team finishes the Tarzan reel. Moriana and Wilhoit brush themselves off, and crash on the couch in the back of the sound booth. Gezalyan plays back the day’s work.

“Nice, very nice,” he says quietly, repeating his muted refrain that has punctuated the studio’s activity throughout the afternoon. “Shall we take a look at the reel we’re doing tomorrow?”

The Foley team has a brief conversation filled with “whooshes,” “whomps” and “swishes,” then heads out. The lights go off.