Meet Edward, a Giant Leap for Footstep Sound Effects

Hi Tobias, welcome back to the A Sound Effect blog. What exactly is Edward?

Hey Asbjoern, great to be back on A Sound Effect to share some great news!
Edward is the missing link for post production studios when it comes to Foley Artists. Every movie sound editor knows how much Foley Artists can improve the audio part of a movie. I was working as a Foley editor in the past and started to love the Foley work.
But for some projects , you need to use library sounds. Sometimes that’s what the budget allows for, or maybe you need to fix little parts. Getting good footstep sounds from small libraries is not easy (or that much fun), so I created a massive arsenal of high quality recorded footsteps; footsteps that can be treated the way I needed, and be playable like an instrument. That’s a LOT more fun – and it’s called Edward, The Foleyart Instrument.
 

What made you do a library dedicated to footstep sounds? And what’s included in the library?

When I launched Tovusound back in 2013 I worked on a short with a small budget and badly recorded dialog. There were even parts with no audio at all. I quickly ran out of footstep sounds and decided to spend a little (and in the end, an unbelievable amount of ;D) time at the Foley stage. That’s how this project started.

It’s not easy to create a library that’s as flexible as an actual Foley Artist. No library can replace real Foley, but with Edward you can get some incredible results.

No library can replace real Foley, but with Edward you can get some incredible results.

Edward comes with a great set of shoes like business, heels, boots, slipper, sneaker and even barefoot, with different walking behaviors like slow, very slow, normal, fast, stop, jump and many other moves.
 

As a special feature, Edward is packed with different clothing movements, which can be combined with the footsteps to enrich the natural sound.
For the surfaces we used concrete, hardwood floor, gravel, timber floor and carpet. These combinations give enough potential to cover many needs.
The Edward instrument includes exact 23200 footstep sounds and 1800 clothing movements in high class 24/96 recordings.
 

In general, what’s the key to convincing footstep sounds, in your opinion?

I think footsteps have to be sound natural and real. They should give the impression of actually moving forward. I like to hear a difference between a left and a right step and of course the different characters of shoes. The balance between material and step should be nice, the perspective should fit in the scene and of course the timing is very important.
 

What are some of the advantages of using Kontakt for footstep sounds?

Well, when I started building Edward I was thinking about what tools could be helpful in creating and managing such a massive library. Kontakt is an industry standard and comes with many great features. First off I tried Reaktor, since I am a big fan, but it couldn’t handle so many files very well, and I found the modulation affected the natural sound too much. So it was clear for me that Kontakt was the way to go.

The most important things for a Foleyart instrument are to preserve the natural sound and to be easy to handle. Kontakt comes with the ability to randomize sound in a way I find very suitable for footsteps. That means hitting the same key twice, Edward never plays the same sample in a row. Instead, it’ll play the sample that followed – and after a left step it will automatically play the next real right step. This is just great and you will hear what I mean. Also Kontakt’s own compression file format ‘.ncw’ is great for handling 800 sounds per patch in this high quality, even on smaller machines.
 

How about users who don’t run Kontakt – can they still use Edward?

Yes of course, Edwards library is also available in WAV-format with Meta Tags. If you don’t run Kontakt, you even have the advantage of the perspective recording. Each sound is recorded in different perspectives and delay corrected to give you the ability to mix them together to fit perfectly into the scene.
 

What were the recording sessions and setup like for this? With this many footstep sounds, it must have taken quite a while to do?

Oh yes… It was an incredibly huge task to record and edit all the sounds, so I am very happy to finally released them. But before I talk about the recordings I would really like to say thanks to my helping hands – without them I could never have finished this library.

Many thanks to Holger Schneider, Tovusound’s mixing engineer. He really helped me out on this project from the first minute. He did the recording and mixing of all the sounds. Thanks to all Foley artists I could convince to help, thanks to André Norman from Colightning for his great artwork, and a special thanks to Lothar Segeler, Soundvision’s founder which is one of Cologne major addresses when it comes to cinema sound. He liked the idea of Edward and supported us where he could. Big thanks.

Recoding Foley is always a challenge. Every shoe acts differently, every surface, too. Just doing a quick recording doesn’t work in most cases. Take time, listen how the shoe sounds. Maybe the material covers the step too much, try another shoe, adjust the microphones, use other microphones and so on.

Edward took nearly 1 year to finish, and we tried everything we could imagine to get the best out of the Foley stage.

I can’t count how many times we decided to re-record sounds while editing. Edward took nearly 1 year to finish, and we tried everything we could imagine to get the best out of the Foley stage. For me it was very important to use more than one microphone, as I wanted to give Edward the ability to adjust the distance afterwards without using a room response. So we tried different microphones and distances to get there.

We ended up using a Neumann U87 for the close perspective and mostly the Schoeps CM for the distance positions. To get them in time I corrected the delay in post. Now you can easy mix them together if needed.
We recorded with a Studer Console which adds a beautiful soft natural sound.
 

What was the trickiest part of making this library?

In the beginning when I was scripting the algorithm of Edward I had to manage a couple of tricky things. CPU overloads, missing or wrong samples. I had to find out which algorithm seems best for Edward. This took a while cause I am not a real coder, but a big challenge was the distance recording of the very quiet sounds like creeping barefoot or the slow movements of clothes. For this cases we had to use some more directional microphones.
 

How can Edward be a good complement to using real Foley artists?

Edward is not meant to replace real Foley artists. They deliver some unique and great-sounding performances, and if at all possible, it’s always recommended to bring them in. But there are situations where deadlines, budgets, logistics or other practical circumstances mean that bringing in a real Foley artist is not an option. For those situations, Edward can be a wonderful help.