Inside the world of foley artists: ‘Watermelons are brilliant for the sound of brains hitting the floor’

Foley artists are film and television's unsung heroes: the people who create sounds, for everything from crunchy snow, kissing and horses' hooves. Just don't mention coconuts

Monday morning in the small Essex town of Coggeshall, and in an unassuming building that used to be a laundry, a man named Barnaby is trying to sound like a horse. Trying and succeeding, uncannily. Not neighing or whinnying, just making the sound of the hooves on the ground.

In a big screen on the wall of a windowless room is an armoured knight astride a white warhorse. It's Richard III, as it happens, accompanied by a gaggle of guards, also armoured and mounted. It's a scene from The Lost King, Stephen Frears's upcoming film about the woman who, after 30 years of looking, discovered Richard's remains under a Leicester car park.