Topic Development

Passage IV — Celery and Cornstarch

[1] In a quiet studio, a woman stands on a tray of gravel and watches a film projected on the wall. On the screen, an actor is hiking up a mountain trail. Watching the actor closely, the gravel crunches under her feet (31) in time with each of his steps, and a microphone a few feet away records every sound.

[2] This work is called Foley, after Jack Foley, a sound editor who (32) developed many of its techniques at Universal Studios in the late 1920s. Films record dialogue on set, but most of the other sounds an audience hears is (33) added later. Microphones on a set are aimed at the actors’ mouths. They pick up speech clearly but miss quieter sounds, such as footsteps, rustling clothes, and the clink of a cup set down on the surface of a tabletop. (34) Foley artists recreate these sounds in a studio, one scene at a time.

[3] Foley studios are usually lined with soundproof panels. (35) A bundle of celery snapped in two can stand in for a breaking bone. Cornstarch squeezed inside a leather pouch sounds remarkably like footsteps in snow. A pair of leather gloves, flapped quickly, makes a convincing sound. (36)

[4] The goal is not to copy reality exactly. Audiences, it turns out, are totally down with (37) sounds that match what they expect to hear, even when those sounds are not what a real event would produce. A real punch, recorded up close, sounds like a dull thud, Foley artists therefore (38) often slap a raw steak or punch a head of cabbage to make a movie fight sound more dramatic. (39)

[5] The next time a film makes you wince at the sound of a breaking bone, listen closely. You might be hearing a vegetable.

Passage V — Mapping the Curb

[1] When Marisol Vega’s grandfather began using a wheelchair, the two of them discovered that their neighborhood was full of obstacles they had never noticed. A curb without a ramp could turn a short trip to the pharmacy into a long detour. A cracked or tilted slab of sidewalk was even worse, it could (41) tip the chair forward.

[2] Nevertheless, (42) Marisol, then a high school sophomore, decided to record every barrier within a mile of her home. Armed with a phone, a tape measure, and a notebook, she walked and covered on foot (43) each block, photographing missing ramps, broken slabs, and poles planted in the middle of the path. At every stop, she recorded what she found. (44)

[3] By winter, Marisol’s notebook held more than three hundred entries. She typed them into a free online mapping program, marking each problem with a colored pin: red for barriers that blocked a wheelchair completely and yellow for those that only slowed it down. In January, she presented the finished map to the citys’ (45) public works department. The engineers there were super psyched about (46) what she had built.

[4] Marisol’s map arrived at a useful moment. (47) The city had money set aside for sidewalk repairs but no complete list of where repairs were most needed. Within two years, crews had installed forty new curb ramps and repaired and fixed (48) more than a hundred broken slabs. Several of the new ramps sit on the very corners that had once forced her grandfather into long detours. (49) Marisol, now a college engineering student, still updates the map every spring.

Passage II — Learning the Grain

[1] The canoe had spent eleven years upside down in my uncle’s barn before I dragged it into the daylight. Its cedar strips had turned gray, and the varnish had cracked into a pattern like dried mud. Covered in dust and pigeon feathers, my uncle had clearly forgotten the boat. (11)

[2] Restoring it would require three things; patience, (12) a heat gun, and a great deal of sandpaper. I already owned the last two. Patience, as my uncle kept reminding me, I would have to learn off of (13) the wood itself.

[3] I have always enjoyed working outdoors. (14) For the first week, I sanded in quick circles, the way I had seen people do in online videos. The wood came up fuzzy and scarred. Then my uncle ran his thumb along one strip and pointed out the faint lines inside it. The fibers in every strip, he explained, leans (15) the same way, like the hair on a dog’s back. Sanding with the grain leaves the surface smooth; to sand against it lifts (16) tiny splinters.

[4] After that, the work went faster. Over the next two months, I stripped the old varnish, patched a long split with a thin piece of new cedar, and brushed on three coats of marine varnish. The patch was a shade lighter than the rest of the hull at first, but after a few weeks in the sun it blended (17) into the surrounding wood.

[5] Last August, I finally carried the canoe down to the lake. It floated level and dry, its hull glowing amber in the late sun, (18) and my uncle, standing on the dock, declared it more smoother (19) than it had been on the day he bought it.