I am going to do sound effects to an interesting independ short movie. I have actually no experience in recording sound effects beforehand.

Do you guys have tips and tricks to give a first-time foley artist? I record effects with my minidisc recorder. How do you for example create "walking on the grass"?

Experiment. Foley artists, if i'm not mistaken, usually own totes full of random household items that they "play" with to create different sounds. Honestly, I'd just grab some sh** from around your house and start playin around with it. There may even be some online resource that could give you an idea as to what items make what sounds. Check it out.

For walking on grass you can try getting the tape out of a few audio cassette tapes, and crunching it up, and then softly squishing it with something. I've never done that one, but it's what everyone always recommends.

I have done a good deal of foley, and it's really fun. Basically, you need to think creatively. Rather than looking for the object you're doing the sound for, you need to look for something that will make the sound people WANT to hear. It's often a different kind of thing. For chains clanking, I ended up getting an absurdly heavy $40 chain, because the little ones sounded like ice, not metal.

I'm a huge foley advocate. Pretty much everything I've done on film so far has been foleyed by necessity (since my cameras are fairly loud). My next project will have some location audio but mostly for dialogue.

I agree that sometimes you need to think outside of the box for sounds, but usually it's best to replicate the actual setting as much as possible - you could crunch cassette tape and try to adjust the reverb and other settings to make it sound like walking across a lawn, but unless you're a profound master it's not going to be as realistic as simply having someone closely boom mic your feet as you walk across a lawn or on a patch of grass in an acoustically similar setting.

I recently recorded some firecrackers to use as gunshots, but even though it was in the backyard there is a significant hard reflection from the house wall. No amount of tweaking can fully remove this or make it sound like a natural forest or field. I have to re-record them in a better environment.

Yes, the ambience of the environment is hugely important. Try to find the quietist place you can to record your sounds. Beware of refrigerator hums, computers, air conditioners, passing traffic, distant lawn mowers, etc.

Also, make sure the room doesn't have any echo or reverberation. The more padding (rugs, curtains, etc) the better. Some people record in a closet. The rule is, you can add reverb, but you can't take it away. I once foleyed a the sound of a metal gadget being washed and dropped in a sink in a real bathroom to get the echo, but in general, you don't want that.

It should be noted that if you're interested in recording forest ambience in a natural setting, it's virtually impossible to avoid traffic sounds. Even if you hike thirty miles from the nearest road, there will probably be airplanes and helicopters flying overhead.

We live in a sadly over-developed world for field recording

Technically your suggestion of recording in a highly isolated room and adding reverb later is fine, but I find that in real life the manipulation is never as realistic as simply finding an appropriate environment. If the character is walking on a hardwood floor in a house, record the footsteps in the same house.

This is what Rodriguez did for El Mariachi and it seemed to work OK. I'm sure that a lot of the incidental sounds that could have been foleyed were replaced later, though - getting footsteps to match in a 15 second running shot is virtually impossible if you work with a single, separately-recorded audio track.

I usually delegate a certain portion of an available budget on sound effects and just go buck-wild on sounddogs.com as I edit. It's great fun--oftentimes I make somewhere like 20 purchases of 5 to 10 sound effects each in 15 minutes because I keep coming back for more effects. And the customer service is great--one woman worked with me over a period of two days regenerating download links because I had lost some effects. And the prices aren't half-bad either.

Thank you guys for great tips!