Grogu's footsteps are a pair of ski gloves from the 1980s.
That's the answer Sean England gave when we asked how you perform feet for a character whose feet you barely see. He's a Foley artist at Skywalker Sound, thirty-four years at the company and the last twenty on the stage, and he did Grogu for The Mandalorian and Grogu.
"I want to be cute. That's my number one. Make him sound cute. There are moments where he has other things in his personality, where he's being kind of a pest, or he's being a little confident, and so you play into that. Maybe you get a little harder, or you shuffle more. But doing his feet was just a blast."
The gloves give a soft, padded quality with a bit of weight underneath, which is the trick: Grogu is tiny, but he still has to land on something.
England is an unusual interview, because Foley artists are usually invisible by design and Skywalker rarely lets them out. He talked to Zebra Home Cinema about why footsteps took him a decade to get good at, what actually goes into a fight scene, and the home cinema shop that accidentally started his career.
The Home Theatre Job That Led to Skywalker Sound
England grew up in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, with parents who worked in film and music. Lucasfilm was down the road. He was surrounded by the industry and, for a long time, not especially interested in it.
Music was the passion. He started on drums as a kid, played in bands, and mostly wanted a job that would fund being a musician. In 1991, that job was at a home theatre company called The Media Room, working for a man named Jack Leahy.
Leahy was a significant figure in the San Francisco music and film scene, the man behind Russian Hill Recording, a studio that a great deal of music and film passed through. England had known him since childhood, and the two of them talked constantly while working together at The Media Room.
Then Leahy's wife Susan, who was working at Skywalker Sound, suggested England interview for an audio technician position.
"That's how I ended up getting into Skywalker."
We'd like to note, without editorialising too much, that one of the most decorated Foley artists working today started out installing home cinema.
A Decade in the Machine Room, When Everything Was Still Film
England joined Skywalker in 1993, which put him at the industry's last analog moment.
"There was very little digital material, digital formats. There were a few things, but nothing like Pro Tools. No workstations were really in the mix at that time. Everything was being recorded and edited on 35 millimetre film stock."
His first role was in the transfer department. Production dialogue arrived on quarter-inch tape. Foley arrived on two-inch, 24-track. All of it had to be transferred to 35mm so editors could physically cut it.
The unglamorous job turned out to be the best possible vantage point.
"Every film came through the transfer department. Everybody that worked at Skywalker came through the transfer department. So I got to know everybody and kind of get what they did."
From there he moved onto the mix stages, aligning recorders, running the projector, patching audio, and working the consoles in a technical support role. Which meant sitting inside mixes, listening to films come together, and watching how mixers handled directors.
He calls it his film school. It took about ten years, and by the early 2000s he was a full-time Foley recordist, then briefly a Foley mixer, before deciding to cross what he calls "the other side of the glass" and learn the craft itself.
What Foley Actually Is
The definition matters, because most people assume Foley means sound effects. It doesn't.
"In many ways, we're performing. We're not just creating sounds. We are watching the picture and we are acting out those elements sonically. People talk about the sounds, but we're really trying to tell the story."
The discipline splits in two.
Footsteps are the hard part, and the part everyone underestimates.
"It seems like it would be a natural thing to do. It's far from it. I felt it took me a decade to feel like I was getting good at feet."
Every step involves a chain of decisions. Which shoe. Which surface. Where the microphone sits, so the result matches what the frame is telling you. A man in dress shoes on a New York street raises immediate questions about how gritty that street is, whether the mic should be close for weight and detail or further back for air and space.
Then the actual performance. Some people walk confidently. Some shuffle. Are they sad? Excited? All of that has to be in the feet, and none of it can sound mechanical.
"I don't want you to think about the fact that someone else performed those feet."
Props cover almost everything else, which England defines as anything a human interacts with, and then well beyond that: creatures, droids, and abstract design sounds. He points out a piece of history most people miss. Before the role of sound designer existed as such, a lot of design work happened on Foley stages, because a Foley stage is a controlled room where people can experiment.
When Foley Matters Most
Not every film needs the same amount of it, and England is straightforward about when his work is load-bearing.
On a live-action film shot in real locations with good production recording, the production sound stands up on its own. His job is to blend into it.
"When I hear a sound back that I've recorded against the production and I can't tell where my sound starts and theirs ends, we've definitely achieved greatness."
Then there are the films where production sound isn't usable. Stylised productions shot on plywood stages. Actors in masks whose dialogue has to be replaced anyway. And animation, where there is no production sound at all.
That's where Foley carries the picture, and where it becomes far more subjective. There is no reference for what a droid's footsteps should sound like. There is only whether you believe them.
England's stated goal, either way, is the same:
"People ask me, was the sound good? Was the Foley good? And I'm like, I didn't really pay attention to it. I was so drawn into the story."
The Trap of Being Too Literal
The most interesting craft point England made is about restraint.
"One trapping in Foley is being overly literal, both with your shoe or prop choice, or even your performance. There is an interpretive nature to it. I always say it's the art versus the science, and I'm always going to lean towards the art."
Two constraints push in the same direction.
The first is that Foley has to coexist with everything else. Any sound that fights the dialogue is a sound that doesn't work. Same for the music. England mentions Moana 2, where a song simply arrives, and feet or props have to fit it rhythmically and melodically rather than compete.
The second is bandwidth. He's watched work where every possible sound was made, precisely and in detail.
"It's too much information to take in. You don't want to be distracted by the sounds on screen."
His best footsteps, he says, happen in the morning, before he's fully thinking.
"I'm best at footsteps in the morning when I'm just settling that cup of coffee. I'm still a little tired and I'm not thinking about it. I'm just trying to be that character. There's a certain organic thing and randomness that you allow to happen, and sometimes that's the magic."
He also notes the obvious thing that isn't obvious: plenty of feet aren't performed with feet. Animated characters, horses, and droids are often done by hand, with gloves, clubs, or metal props.
Grogu, Ronni Brown, and the Scene With No Music
On The Mandalorian and Grogu, England worked with his Foley partner Ronni Brown. She took Mandalorian himself, which is a substantial load given how much he's on screen: all of his footsteps, all of his armour, and his spurs, which do a lot of quiet work establishing the Western register of the character.
That freed England to take Grogu, along with a large share of the droids, the Anzellans, and Embo the bounty hunter. He'd worked on Clone Wars, so several of those characters were familiar to him from the animated series before they reached the big screen.
Grogu's challenge is the absence of sync points.
"You're not seeing the sort of movement that one would use for sync points. You don't see the shoulders dip like a real person. You definitely don't see the feet."
Hence the ski gloves, and hence a performance built on feel rather than frames.
His favourite work in the film is a sequence where Grogu goes off on his own, wandering through a forest across logs, dirt, and foliage, and then makes a potion while Mandalorian is out of action.
"There's no other sound. The fire's crackling in the background. There's no music, nobody's talking. They really featured the Foley."
This is worth flagging for anyone who cares about playback. A sequence with no dialogue and no score is the single most exposed thing in a film, because the entire scene lives or dies on quiet detail. It is also the first thing destroyed by a system that can't resolve low-level information, or a room with a noise floor high enough to swallow it. The dynamic range that makes that scene work is exactly what a properly specified and calibrated system exists to protect.
England's own verdict on seeing it in a theatre:
"I totally buy what's going on. I knew what I did, I knew it was Foley, but it didn't take me out of it. It drew me into it even more, which is what you hope for."
The Legends, and the Speed Problem
When England started at Skywalker, the Foley department was two people: Jana Vance and Dennie Thorpe, and it stayed that way for years.
"It was hard to break into that world, because you're competing against legends that have years of experience."
He spent that period recording and mixing their work, which he now regards as the ideal education, because he learned what excellent Foley sounds like across wildly different kinds of films before he ever had to make it himself. Rango, Avatar, and Tron: Legacy all passed through while he was on the recording side.
The thing that has genuinely changed is time.
"Making good sounds and having good performances is great, but we have to do it fast. We had a little more time back in the day. Now, I don't know how you cut your teeth as a Foley artist, because we have to work so fast."
Two recent animated features illustrate the load.
*Zootopia 2* was, in his words, extremely busy. A huge cast of different character types, and an entire wet world of seals and fish where everything flops and smacks. Also a sloth, which he notes was mercifully easy.
*Super Mario 2* was the busiest film he has ever worked on.
"It starts and it does not stop. Everybody's moving all the time."
Mario and Luigi are straightforward sonically, since work boots are work boots. The problem is that animated characters don't behave like people.
"Humans kind of telegraph their moves. Animated characters just move on the drop of a dime."
Yoshi took real experimentation. The production wanted a sound that was uniquely his. England tried walking him in shoes, then other gloves, but Yoshi's feet look like big puffy balls, so he ended up on boxing gloves over a cloth, to kill any grit or scratch against concrete.
"Yoshi in the end ended up being really easy for me, because I'm a drummer and he's really consistent. He's kind of bouncy, he's goofy."
The larger challenge on that film was space. Constant music, constant effects, plus a heavy layer of video game sounds.
"If every sound played at one time, your head might explode."
How Violence Gets Made
Since Foley's reputation rests partly on the folklore, we asked England to confirm what's true. Most of it is.
Coconut shells: yes, to a degree.
The gruesome stuff: chamois, the goat-skin cloths people use to dry cars, do most of the liquid work. Also hair gel, pasta, and celery.
"All of those things that you joke about us using, we use."
Body impacts: heavy cloth, boxing gloves, sparring pads, and baseball mitts to fatten the sound. Close-miked, and sometimes performed on yourself. He mentions hearing that the Fight Club team ended up with a lot of bruises.
Interestingly, he's asked to perform fewer big punches now than you'd expect, partly because of time pressure and partly because the industry has spent decades building those libraries already. What Foley contributes instead is everything around the punch: the grabbing, the blocking, the grappling, and above all the feet.
The Raid 2 is his benchmark for physical exhaustion. He was the only Foley artist on it.
"I was beat at the end of every day, because it was just fight scenes that went on for ten minutes. And you can see their feet."
That last point contains a real piece of craft. Feet you can't see are an opportunity, because the artist can tell the story however serves the scene. Feet you can see are an obligation, and in a well-choreographed fight, they have to be exact.
Andor, F1, and What Foley Does for a Race Car
Asked for the work he's proudest of recently, England named two.
*Andor* season two. He describes it as a brilliant show with a brilliant story, and says some of his best work is in it, largely because of what the production allowed.
"They just let us go off. They let us be gritty and wet and depressing."
*F1, which put him on a team with the Finnish Foley artist Heikki Kossi and Skywalker's Shelley Roden*. Alongside the traditional material, including a recurring deck of cards the lead handles, the film demanded things that aren't Foley in any normal sense.
"Doing the pit stops was wild, because they're fast, they're precise, they have to sound big and heavy."
They also covered crashes, the front wing the lead keeps removing and replacing, flat tyres, and gravel spraying. He describes it as a long way from traditional Foley, and a lot of fun.
And then, unprompted, the line that gets at why any of this matters at home:
"Those films both sounded great in the theatre, and are sounding great at least on my home theatre."
The man who performed the sounds checks his own work in a home cinema. That's the standard the format is supposed to meet: not louder than a theatre, but faithful enough that the person who made the detail can still find it. The gap between hearing a race and hearing the pit stop as a physical event is entirely a function of the room and the system.
Influences and Favourites
England credits the people who invented the language:
"Whether it's Ben Burtt, Randy Thom, Gary Rydstrom, that's informed a lot of what I do as a Foley artist and how I approach sound."
He got lucky early, working on J.J. Abrams' Super 8 with Ben Burtt as sound designer.
His own taste runs to the opposite of what he mostly works on. A child of the eighties: Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, John Hughes films, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Spinal Tap, Airplane!. Then the high-school phase of renting everything: The Conversation, Chinatown, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Jaws. As an adult: all of Tarantino, all of Fincher, all of Wes Anderson.
He'd rewatched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood the night before we spoke, and made a point of crediting Gary Hecker's Foley on it.
More recently he named Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Obsession, which he'd seen in a packed theatre the week before. The audience composition struck him as much as the film did: substantially younger than him, substantially female, and actually there.
"It made sense to me why that film is doing well."
He'd like to do more independent work, the A24 and Blumhouse and Neon end of the spectrum, though he acknowledges it doesn't always fit Skywalker's schedules or budgets. He'd also like to do a horror film, because gore is fun for Foley and he doesn't get enough of it.
Coming up: season two of X-Men '97 on Disney+, which he worked on across both seasons, and a standalone Punisher episode that let him do the kind of violence he rarely gets.
On Revealing the Trick
England closed on something we didn't expect, given that he'd just spent an hour explaining his methods.
"I never thought of Foley as being a front-facing sort of thing. I liked that it was out of sight, out of mind, because I sort of feel like film in general is all smoke and mirrors and I like keeping it that way. But people want to see how films are made. They want to learn what these processes are. So I'm willing to pass along that information to the people who want to hear it."
Which is roughly the Penn and Teller position: show the audience how the trick works, and the trick gets more impressive, not less.
Key Takeaways
- ▪Sean England is a Foley artist at Skywalker Sound with thirty-four years at the company, the last twenty on the Foley stage. He performed Grogu, most of the droids, the Anzellans, and Embo in The Mandalorian and Grogu, while his Foley partner Ronni Brown covered the Mandalorian's footsteps, armour, and spurs.
- ▪Grogu's footsteps were performed with 1980s ski gloves, chosen for a soft padded quality with enough weight to make a tiny character land convincingly. With no visible feet or shoulder movement to sync against, the performance is built entirely on feel.
- ▪Foley is performance, not sound effects. Footsteps are the hardest element and took England roughly a decade to feel confident with, because every step encodes shoe, surface, microphone placement, and the emotional state of the character walking.
- ▪The craft's central discipline is restraint. Being overly literal, or making every possible sound, produces a track that competes with dialogue and music and overloads the audience. Foley has to fit around the mix, not fill it.
- ▪Practical technique is exactly as folkloric as its reputation: chamois for liquids and gore, hair gel, pasta, celery, boxing gloves and sparring pads for body impacts, and yes, coconut shells.
- ▪Scenes with no dialogue and no music, such as Grogu's solo forest sequence, are the most exposed material in any film and depend entirely on low-level detail surviving playback. England checks his own work on his home theatre, which is a reasonable benchmark for what a system should be able to resolve.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Foley in film sound?
Foley is the practice of performing everyday sounds in sync with picture, in a purpose-built studio, to replace or reinforce what was captured on set. It divides into footsteps and props, where props means anything a character interacts with, plus creatures, droids, and abstract sounds. The defining characteristic is that it's performed rather than assembled: the artist watches the picture and acts the sounds out in real time, aiming to convey character and emotion rather than just generate noise.
Who performed Grogu's footsteps in The Mandalorian and Grogu?
Sean England, a Foley artist at Skywalker Sound, performed Grogu, along with many of the film's droids, the Anzellans, and the bounty hunter Embo. He used a pair of 1980s ski gloves to create Grogu's footsteps, giving a soft padded texture with enough weight to sell the character's presence. His Foley partner Ronni Brown handled the Mandalorian's footsteps, armour, and spurs.
Why are footsteps the hardest part of Foley?
Because they carry character, and audiences notice when they're wrong even if they can't say why. Every step requires choosing a shoe, choosing a surface, and placing a microphone to match the framing, then performing the walk with the right confidence, hesitation, or mood. England, with two decades on the Foley stage, says it took him about ten years to feel he was getting good at feet, and that footsteps remain the most heavily scrutinised element of the job.
Do Foley artists really use coconut shells and celery?
Yes. England confirms that most of the folklore is accurate. Chamois cloths, which are goat skin, do a large share of the liquid and gore work. Hair gel, pasta, and celery all appear regularly. Boxing gloves, sparring pads, and baseball mitts are used to fatten body impacts, and coconut shells genuinely do get used for hooves.
How is Foley for animation different from live action?
On live action with good production recording, the Foley artist's goal is to match and blend so seamlessly that the join is inaudible. Animation has no production sound at all, so Foley carries far more of the picture and becomes much more subjective, since there's no reference for what a droid or an animated creature should sound like. Animated characters also move unpredictably, without the physical wind-up that real humans telegraph, which makes them significantly harder to perform against.
Does a home cinema system change how much Foley you hear?
Considerably. Foley detail sits at low levels underneath dialogue and music by design, so it's the first thing lost to a limited system, a high room noise floor, or heavy compression. Sequences built without dialogue or score, where Foley is the only thing carrying the scene, are the most exposed of all. England watches his own theatrical work at home to check it, which suggests the standard a serious system should aim for.
