A couple of days ago I had the joy to do some Foleys for an installation in the Deutsche Kinemathek about Ken Adam, the famous production designer of numerous big movies including Dr. Strangelove, several James Bond movies and others.
The most important part of these Foleys was the sound of Adam sketching and Director Boris Hars-Tschachotin had told me beforehand he would bring the pen that Adam had used on the shooting of the footage for the installation. I thought ‘yeah well, we’ll see how that sounds…’ and packed a bunch of different pens myself because in Foleys it’s only sometimes the original that makes the desired sound. But in fact the pen he brought sounded special and really good so that’s what we used. It was only in the middle of the recordings that he actually told me that the pen I was using was not only the one Adam had used during this particular shooting but the one that the majority of his famous designs had been made with:
So though I am usually not a sucker for celebrities imitating the drawing noises of this visionary 93-year-old artist with his own precious tool was a humble moment and made these already supernice recording session a really special one…
The installation is being opened today (Dec 10th, 2014) in presence of Ken Adam himself and is open to the public from tomorrow on.