The brilliant The Filmumentaries Podcast is back, and this time out host Jamie Benning chats with a Skywalker Sound veteran, foley artist Sean England. They discuss his 30+ year career with the company, some of the tricks of the trade, stories of his time in the world of TV and film and plenty more besides.
Sean England has been at Skywalker Sound since 1993. He didn’t arrive as a foley artist. He came in on the technical side, in the machine room and the transfer department, back when everything went to analog tape and film was spliced on a Kem. He calls those years his film school. He watched sound get made from one end of a picture to the other, then became a foley recordist, then a mixer, then went through the glass and became the artist.
The show where he cut his teeth was The Clone Wars. There was one foley stage at the Ranch in those days, so he and Ronni Brown took the night shift and cranked the episodes out, learning to work fast and picking up the Star Wars tricks handed down from Dennie Thorpe and Jana Vance.He’s very good on what the job actually is. An egg crack might be an ice cream cone. The sizzle in the pan might be a candle held under tinfoil. He’s got a recording of a cattle gate on his phone that he still hasn’t cracked, and then somebody gave him a metal contraption built for hanging blueprints and it turned out to be exactly the sound.
He picks up leather purses in thrift shops and holds them to his ear to check for creak. He puts shoes on and looks for a hard surface to walk on.He’s a drummer too, and he came up in the eighties being told drum machines would replace him, so he has a settled view on whether sound libraries and new tech are coming for his job.We cover the anatomy of a foley stage, why the mixer isn’t watching his hands, the weight difference between Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar, Lincoln split between a day crew and a night crew who had to match each other, grasshopper footsteps for documentaries, mic placement as performance, and the off-mic tricks he doesn’t always mention to the mixer.