Mission Aviation Fellowship is celebrating 25 years of service in Haiti. A film crew from MAF recently returned from Haiti, where they captured several stories for a video they are working on. Lance Olenik, the narrator for the video and, incidentally, MAF’s webmaster, grew up as a missionary kid in Africa, where his dad flew airplanes for MAF. He learned French as a kid, and it came in handy during the production of the video–French is part of Haiti’s language and culture. We captured his flawless French, and MAF’s video crew whisked it off to editing.

We’ve been working on some interesting Foley projects recently. One program required a rider hopping off of a horse onto a dirt path. To replicate that, we brought in saddle with all of its great creakiness and jangling bridles. Then we filled an empty Foley box with a couple inches of dirt. The creak/crunch we captured was perfect! It’s a bit nerve-wracking to put a $500 microphone that close to the dusty dirt…

This is a typical setup for an outdoor Foley scene. The foot mic goes down close to the dirt, while the hand mic is pointed about at my stomach. Notice that each mic stand is on thick foam-this prevents any boom or thump from traveling up the mic stand into the microphone. Also notice the lone shoe back there on the concrete Foley box. Every time I’m near a thrift store, I stop in to see if I can find a pair of shoes with a unique-sounding sole. That shoe, while ugly to look at, makes a perfect high-heeled click.