Foley artists paint with sounds to enhance Snake River Radio Players performance of a ‘A Christmas Carol’
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IDAHO FALLS — The Snake River Radio Players are putting the finishing touches on their 2022 show, “A Christmas Carol.”
The production presents Charles Dickens’ classic holiday story in the manner of a radio show from the 1940s, with actors reading their lines from a script while decked out in period-specific costumes. The show is scheduled for this Thursday, Friday and Saturday at Trinity United Methodist Church in Idaho Falls.
One aspect of the show that doesn’t get as much attention is the work of the foley artists, who use a multitude of techniques to add real-time sound effects.
While they may not be in the spotlight, the foley artists’ work is critical to painting detailed, complete scenes in the heads of the audience and enhancing the emotional impact of each scene.
“A foley artist makes all the sound, so your imagination doesn’t have to,” SRRP foley artist Mike Belgard told EastIdahoNews.com. “Crackling fires, wind chimes, all of that so that it adds more depth. On a movie, you have visual and auditory cues, but with (what we’re doing), you only have auditory cues, so we’ve got to fill in the blanks.”
“There are points where doing foley almost feels like being an instrumentalist in a band,” said Ryan Atwood, music supervisor, and Belgard’s fellow foley artist. “It’s like the actors are the vocalists, and your job is to make sound that supports what they’re doing. It’s all about trying to be in sync with them.”
The process of creating foley for a play like “A Christmas Carol” starts with the script.
“We look for opportunities in the script where a sound is mentioned or a sound might be present,” Belgard said. “If someone is writing at a desk, we add the sound of them writing on paper. We look for opportunities to do that because while we are doing a ‘radio show,’ we do have a live audience and any of these bits and pieces we add to make it feel more like the 40s, I think it adds more depth and more personality.”
SRRP’s “A Christmas Carol” includes sound effects that are produced practically as well as some digital sound effects. The digital effects are essential for supplying sounds that are outside of the production’s ability or just too expensive to produce.
“There are a couple of scenes where you’re out in the street, and I created some immersive sound effects of crowds and street noise,” Atwood said. “An instance of digital and practical effects working together is this scene where I play this digital effect I put together of random street noise. But this year, Mike is adding horse hooves with two empty halves of coconuts and banging them together.”
The desired effect is to give the audience the feeling that they’re in the scenes and experiencing the story right alongside the characters.
“We lean pretty heavily into the fact that (‘A Christmas Carol’) is a ghost story,” Belgard said. “The sound is what really draws the audience in. We have the scene in the graveyard that has a creaky gate that’s being blown in the wind and some groaning wind. When it’s done right, it puts goosebumps on the back of your neck. It’s genuinely creepy. We’re going for that emotional impact. When Scrooge is at his worst and fearing for his soul, the sound helps to add that edge or that weight to that scene.”
You can catch the Snake River Radio Players’ production of “A Christmas Carol” this Thursday, Dec. 8, Friday, Dec. 9 and Saturday, Dec. 10 at Trinity United Methodist Church in Idaho Falls at 7 p.m. There is also a Saturday matinee on Dec. 10 at 2 p.m. Admission is free, but donations will be accepted and go toward the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Center.
For those who would like to see the show but can’t make it out, the Radio Players will be streaming the Dec. 9 performance on their Facebook page.
