Foley sound

I used these videos below to answer the following questions:

What is a foley artist, what do they do and why are they needed?

a foley artist is a post-production sound creator, their job is to add in sounds that might have lost potency on set and to add drama to scenes using sounds, like a horses hooves or a sword being drawn, even down to each step someone takes is usually added in post with foley sound, roughly 90% of on screen sounds in big budget films are actually foley so they're very important to the final piece of a film.

Explain the order in which the Foley artist creates the sound (mention the 'prop pass')?

first they do all the footsteps of the lead characters in the film, then the background footsteps, then a "prop pass" - providing sound for anything moving on the screen 

What are the key skills and qualities foley artists need to have?

you have to have the right timing to know when to put in a sound, you also need a good creative mind to be able to decompose a sound into it's most basic form to creare a realistic composition of sounds to make a realistic effect.

What is the advantage of using real objects to create sound FX rather than using digital production or sound libraries?

with a real sound you can trick the audience into thinking they know the sound already and you can't fake validity, it sounds a lot more accurate when it's filmed a lot more analogue. 

Using specific examples describe how key sounds are created (use the Star Wars and Robin Hood clips if you want).

in robin hood they created the sound of swords being drawn using a spatula dragged across a piece of metal, they also created horse sounds using the hooves layered with metal chains and leather bending and a man doing horse snorting noises to come together and make a very realistic horse noise.