TIMECODE NAME Dialogue MUSIC 00.00.01 NARRATOR This is the BBC Academy Podcast, essential listening for the production, journalism and technology broadcast communities, your guide to everything from craft skills to taking your next step in the industry. 00.00.13 CHARLES Hello and welcome from me, Charles Miller, today we’re getting expert views about the recording and use of sound in media, everything from (music) to (bells) and even a bit of (talking). Today you’re going to be hearing the highlights of an event at BBC Birmingham held in partnership with the Producers Forum where the Director of the BBC Academy, Joe Godwin spoke to three sound professionals. The event was held in the venerable radio drama studio at BBC Birmingham, so Joe first spoke to two people who used it all the time. 00.00.52 CHARLES Huw Kennair-Jones is Editor of the Archers, and Jessica Dromgoole is Editor of Home Front, both on Radio 4, he asked them to demonstrate some of the strange collection of props that were lying around in the studio, it turns out that it would be hard to guess what sounds they are used for. 00.01.07 JESSICA This was, I don’t know what it is normally, it’s probably a gardening glove. But we used it as a bat that got trapped in a room, which was very good and really, really awful, you used dominos. [as ice sometimes], sometimes, we used them as teeth, we pulled teeth in the dentist, so you improvise, according to the weight and the surface of what you’re working with you improvise the sound. 00.01.34 HUW The ironing board [oh yes] for us is. JESSICA A farm gate. 00.01.39 HUW A farm gate. JESSICA I’m not doing it very well; I’m in the right job. HUW What else have we got there’s lot of riding, everybody is riding and sometimes people do actually sit on the saddle. 00.01.57 JESSICA We could in theory play in the sound, electronically, but it helps the actors hugely, I mean it’s like another character the sound. JOE And why have we got a mini display unit from Robert Dyas doorbell department here? 00.02.15 HUW These are all, these are all the different bells, (doorbell) that’s a (doorbell) I don’t know who’s bell that is but there’s some. JOE That’s Glebe Cottage.

HUW Apparently oh yes, well yes. And there’s the (doorbell sound), I’d never heard that on the Archers is that on? 00.02.34 HUW That’s just a round of. JESSICA Someone got a new one. HUW That’s Glebe Cottage as well. JESSICA You’ve got a good buzzer haven’t you?

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HUW Oh that’s quite good. I don’t think. JOE And that’s Keepers Cottage I believe. HUW Yes. 00.02.45 HUW Oh that’s who has a bell like that, anyway, I think that’s, well that might be retired soon, I think. JOE Thank you for revealing some of the secrets, maybe we’ll just go and have a gin and tonic [thanks] and relax, so and a big thank you to Huw, and Jessica. 00.03.04 CHARLES You’ll never be able to hear those farm gates without thinking of an ironing board. In the main part of the session Joe found out about the work of three people who each work with sound in different ways. Neil Hillman is a Sound Designer and Editor, Mark Silk is a voice over artist and Alice Truman is a sound track composer. JOE Can you each tell us what you actually do, what do your jobs involve, Neil? 00.03.27 NEIL I suppose, well I guess like my colleagues its designed to bring impact to pictures and to make them more memorable, and I tend to do that with the forums of, I work as a sports outsider broadcast mixer, I work as a location sound recordist and then I work in a post production environment as well as a sound designer or supervising sound editor brining a cohesive soundtrack together. JOE Okay, I think we know what you do Mark, tell me about the appeal of sound over vision? 00.03.58 MARK I love the immediacy of sound, I love the fact that you can tell a story in a heartbeat with your own, as an audience you can close your eyes and you are immersed in that place. But shows and films have iconic sound design and Neil will talk about this more later, but if you say light sabre, you know what that sounds like; you know kids in playgrounds will go around making that noise. You know there are certain iconic sound or vocal effects even from cartoon characters, I mean I grew up loving Scooby Doo and so you know when you hear (noise) you know who that is, probably. 00.04.33 You know by the way I’m not the original voice of Scooby Doo, he’s dead. But day to day I’m in mostly in my studio day to day you know technology is our friend, probably about 20% of the work is going around other places around the world, most of the UK, performing characters and creating new voices for new shows, but every now and then there are those certain bits of treasure that those shows or those productions that I grew up with, where the people that did those voices originally aren’t around anymore so they need someone to carry on that legacy. 00.05.10 And I’ve been fortunate enough to get us to do that every now and then. JOE Alice, why did you make the choice rather than the concert platform to go into composing for sound tracks? 00.05.21 ALICE Well I’d always enjoyed writing music but I didn’t really have a focus for it, so I’d write a little tune, didn’t really know what to do with it and then I was actually working at Lighthouse, Media Centre and Peter McCluskey there suggested I entered this www.bbc.co.uk/academy 2

soundtrack competition, and that was literally the first time I thought about doing it. So I had a go and it seemed everything just seemed to click for me then, it just seems to make more sense to me having visuals to work with or I’ve worked a lot in radio drama, music for radio drama. 00.05.56 ALICE Then I’ve got the script to work with, I’ve got the ideas, I’ve got something that I can visualise in my head, and I just really enjoy adding to the emotional content of a film, it’s almost like I’m trying to steal your job a bit, I’m trying to be an actor acting [what!] every role a bit, well you’re more of a voice over actor aren’t you, but I kind of. JOE Do you mean the score is a character in the film? 00.06.27 ALICE Well I’m all the characters and the places. JOE Can I ask you Neil, just this thing about the relationship between sound and pictures, what would you say to somebody who says actually in a movie or a TV drama its actually the pictures that do the heavy lifting and the sounds a nice to have add on? 00.06.46 NEIL Well there’s a famous quote from Stephen Spielberg that says the ICs better when the sound is great, and I think that for the most part people understand that it’s not a conflict between sound is more important than pictures, or pictures are more important. It’s a relationship that changes, depending on the emotional content of what needs to go on, so it is a marriage between the two things, but I think that it’s really not an argument or a discussion point to say that one is more dominant than the other. JOE Although bad sound could be very distracting can’t it? 00.07.20 NEIL It can be and then there’s a quote that I try to say to people that when the sound is bad you notice the sound, when the sound is good you notice the pictures. So it’s one of those things that I think is most fascinating working in sound as the medium, I started in radio, in university radio in actual fact, but I felt that I wanted to have pictures to put my sound against. 00.07.46 CHARLES As well as the relation of pictures and sound, for sound designers there’s also the question of how the music fits with the rest of the soundtrack, here’s Neil’s take on how they should work together rather than compete. 00.07.58 NEIL If you want sound design then you can’t fill your soundtrack with the score, there’s no room for it, so you have to make you know some compromises or decide where you want to go with your film. So one of the things that I as a sound designer, I work very closely with the composer, and obviously with the Director, not only to say well I want to have this scene because there’s such and such going on, but we will have some music, we must have some music in there but there must be some respite to allow some sound to come through. 00.08.32 NEIL But not only that I would talk to the composer and say actually I’d like this particular range of frequencies please because what I’m trying to do is this, how does that work for your orchestration and we’ll talk about what instruments he might like to use at that point. And so really we are working very collaboratively.

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JOE From the start, before its shot? 00.08.53 NEIL From the start, from the star, to obviously the music won’t be composed straight away, but you start to sketch things out really very early on and I think that’s very important one of the things that film makers should do, is be considering sound from the very first time that they have a shooting script. CHARLES When it comes to recording sound on location there’s a choice between a boom mic, usually on the end of a pole and a radio mic clipped to the actor. While the boom is usually a better quality mic, because it’s bigger, Neil says that radio mics are necessary, especially in a wide shot where a boom can’t get close enough to record and actor’s voice strongly, compared to the background. 00.09.35 NEIL One of the things that were a great boon, but also a bane for a sound recordist is radio mics, they are very, very difficult to execute very well, and for many film makers they think that this is some great panacea that they can shoot great wide shots, actors will have complete freedom, and what have you. They are a necessary evil, wherever I would like to use a boom as my primary source of gathering sound. JOE And is that because of the technical quality of radio mics as opposed to the mic you can put on a boom? 00.10.13 NEIL Yes, if you think about a radio mic it is a small capsule, now, if its executed very well, it can work quite well, but as a dialogue editor in post production I know that I have to work quite hard to get the kind of quality that I am looking for, but it is a necessary evil, so if I give you an example of when it is necessary, if we shoot a wide shot but with a boom and it works very well with the perspective, but there’s no music in the shot, and so we see a wide room and the voice is projected in a way and we know, because it has air around it, that we are in that acoustic. 00.10.56 NEIL However, an Exec Producer might come in and say, I’d like to hear that scene with music, as we start to, as a re-recording mixer I’ll say of course and I’ll add some music in, and then we’ll start to lose the voice, if I try to push the voice at that point, all that I’m really going to get is more room ambience, so at that point I need to be able to bring in a radio mic as well so it is a necessary evil, there’s no two ways about it, you do need to do that but as a recordist and as a dialogue editor I would always have my primary source of gathering sound as being the boom. 00.11.33 CHARLES If you can’t get good recording of your actors on location you may have to bring the actor to a studio to rerecord their lines in sync with the pictures, it’s called ADR, Additional Dialogue Recording, and Neil is not a big fan. 00.11.47 NEIL I do an awful lot of dialogue replacement, but then we do have the artistic decision to make that that’s not a performance, my job as a location sound recordist is to capture performance, ADR is replicating something that’s gone before and it never, never ever has that same feel. I’ve done whole films, one of the most amazing experiences was working with Julie Christie and she replaced the whole of her voice in one particular scene and she acted and made it so fantastic, that’s why an Oscar winner is an Oscar winner I suppose. www.bbc.co.uk/academy 4

00.12.30 But otherwise I see the absolute angst that really big name actors go through; they really, really don’t want to be doing ADR. CHARLES Joe turned next to Mark Silk, a leading voice over artist, he’s called on for all kinds of voices including cartoon characters, in fact he’s today’s voice of Scooby Doo. 00.12.48 MARK The original voice of Scooby Doo was a guy called Don Messick and Don Messick was one of the people that could do a bagillion voices and he worked for Hanna-Barbera and he was the voice of he was the voice of “gee Yogi don’t tell about the picnic basket, oh, ho, ho”, he was the voice of loads of these characters, and so when you’re brought in and asked to be that character I like to go right back to the source and go, okay what were they doing, what was going through their mind and what brief would they have got when they created it. 00.13.20 MARK So I’m not trying to copy them, but it’s got to come from the same place as that and then the same with a lot of Warner Brothers characters, you know one of my big heroes was , now Mel Blanc, does anyone know who Mel Blanc is, everyone heard of Mel Blanc? Yes cool. Well for anyone who doesn’t know Mel Blanc was the voice guy for Warner Brothers in the 40s and 50s right through to just before he died in the late 80s, still performing the voices for Roger Rabbit, so Mel Blanc was the voice that you would have heard on all those old 40s cartoons, he was the guy that went, “you are despicable, this is the last time I work with someone with a speech impediment”, and Mel Blanc was “what’s up Doc” and he was “say your prayers you lop eared varmint or I’ll blast you to smitherinees” and Mel Blanc was “come on buddy, let’s go, te, he, he” and a stack of others. 00.14.14 MARK You know he was, “I thought I saw a pussy cat” and “you bet you saw a pussycat, that pussycat was me”, he was that guy and so again, if I’m being brought in to breathe life into any of these other characters that have an established sound and its music, I look at it like music, I’ve always had a descent musical ear and to me, it’s like with music, there is a pitch and there is a tongue where it comes from and there’s a rhythm, there’s a tune to it. CHARLES It’s one thing to take over a well known voice like Scooby Doo, but most of Mark’s work involves creating original voices, he gave Joe an example of how he comes up with them. 00.14.55 MARK There’s a show I worked on for about five years with Jane Horrocks, called Fifi and the Flowertots and Jane was the voice of Fifi and Primrose and I was the voice of two characters, there was a little boy bee called Bramble, who’s a tiny bee and he’s all bunged up because he’s allergic to pollen and then there was a slug called Slugsy, so in terms of creating that character voice, asking about the process, we were shown a picture of this character and you’ve got this big, fat, tubby slug. 00.15.26 MARK And so okay you’ve got an idea of probably the size and weight of how that character should look and feel and sound and then you’ve got a case of, I wanted to know what the characteristics of this slug were, you know is he a devious thing or shut or a ratbag, so it turns out he was lovable and huggable and a bit naught, he’d be your best friend, his best friend was this guy called Stingo, he’s a bit shy and bashful because he’s got a secret crush on this www.bbc.co.uk/academy 5

character called Primrose and yes so you’re working these things and placing it. 00.16.00 MARK Just before I went to the studio down in London to actually mould this character voice, you walk in there with an idea, I’d seen an old carry on film, just flicking through TV that weekend and do you remember Bernard Bresslaw? JOE Very well? 00.16.14 MARK Well Bernard Bresslaw was this big guy in Carry On and, it didn’t matter what he did, I mean this isn’t an exact presentation but its where it came from, it didn’t matter, what was going on he was always perpetually happy, so he’d say oh blimey me house has burnt down, aya, aya, aya”, so he’d be like that and I thought actually that’s a nice starting place for where this thing should come from. So we started off with that but then when I was going through a few lines, we’d start playing it through and you look at that character, you think well this is a slug, its missing something, and we realised what it was, moisture. 00.16.50 MARK So we added some moisture to him and then Slugsy suddenly comes to live, he’s amazing, ha, ha, by the way I hope you don’t mind me saying you’ve got a very calming voice. JOE Thank you. How hard is it to jump from horse to horse as it were on the fly? 00.17.04 MARK I think it’s like if you’re a good musician you can just do it, sometimes they’ll be whole scenes where you’re talking to yourself, so you know might be Bumble talking like this and suddenly it goes to Slugsy. Morning Bumble, hello, whatever your name is, it’s been a very long day. JOE Yes. 00.17.22 MARK But yeah, you know if you actually remembered the words properly or read the script properly you’ll be fine. JOE And the great thing about being a voice over actor is you can have your script in front of you and haven’t got to learn it have you? 00.17.33 MARK Yes we, actually it was just something that you said earlier about technology, it’s such a great time to work, I take a mic everywhere with me if I travel and even in terms of how flexible you can be, delivering things in the turnaround, I was in a hotel in New York back in September and there’s a show called, Got to Dance, with Davina Mccall and they needed all the intros and they needed it like now, and so I got this email just before breakfast, we basically shut the curtains, built a pillow fort on the table, got the script up and then got this mic like dandy I’ve got a hunched over trying to make it sound good and in the hotel I record, right live from Earls Court London, it’s Got To Dance, now ladies and gentlemen please welcome, room service. I’m on the phone, come back later, yes please. CHARLES Finally Joe talked to soundtrack composer Alice Truman; he began by asking her about the production process for a film. 00.18.37 JOE Do you come to write it when its cut and finished, because actually you can’t write the music before anyone’s done any www.bbc.co.uk/academy 6

editing can you, so where do you come in, in the process? 00.18.48 ALICE Well usually I am brought in when they’ve got to the stage where it’s a rough cut, so nearly the final edit, or the actual final edit itself, so yes the films all there, there might be some tweaks and changes, its different with an animation, animation quite often, a lot of it hasn’t been animated by the time I start working, so I get given an anamatic and then I have to be careful to write music that can be shortened and lengthened you know according to fit, because they will change the scenes, once they’ve actually been animated and was always going to be a different length. 00.19.26 ALICE But there has been occasions and its brilliant when this happens, when I’ve been brought in at the script stage, so in preproduction, has that happened to you sometimes as well? MAN Yes. 00.19.35 ALICE It’s really great because then you can really start thinking about the musical themes that you’re going to write early on and bounce them backwards and forwards to the Director, it happened quite a few times when I was working with a local Director from Coventry, Paul Hardy, he brought me in early on and I even got to go along to see the films being shot, which is fun, and I got to be an extra a couple of times although sadly only my left shoulder made the final cut, so. 00.20.01 ALICE But it was just nice to be part of that process at such an early stage, but mostly you do get brought in at the end of the process, when the film’s all there. JOE And do you record the music to the pictures if you’ve got an orchestra ensemble of some sort, do you record it whilst watching the pictures, to make sure it fits, the beats and the moments have to be in the right place don’t they? 00.20.25 ALICE Oh yes you’ve got to be, it’s all about timing, timing is very important, well a lot of what I’ve done is, what I do is using sampled orchestral sounds, so I’m sequencing it all in my studio and fitting everything exactly, but it’s always great to have some live music recorded it really does bring an extra element to it. And in that case it will all have been scored out to make sure it’s the right place, make sure that the Directors happy with it first before you go in and record it obviously and then, then we’ll go into the studio and get that live stuff recorded, but yes we’ll have the video playing to make sure everything’s still fitting to the picture, but a lot of that’s all worked out in my studio at home before I g out to record it. JOE Now money on lower budget productions is obviously increasingly tight, I know there seems to be more money than ever in high end stuff, but in other productions it can be tight, why would a Director chose to have you compose a piece of music rather than just take some mood music off the shelf? 00.21.35 ALICE Oh well there’s many reasons, there’s many reasons why composers would be better, one of them is you’re going to get something unique, that nobody else has got, if you use library music that could have been licensed out to a few different productions, so you’re not necessarily going to get a really unique www.bbc.co.uk/academy 7

piece of music. 00.21.58 ALICE Another thing is if you think about the scores John Williams wrote for Indiana Jones and those kind of films, what he did with those films and most of what he wrote, he used light motif which is basically writing a theme that fits with and encapsulates a character, so you think of Indiana Jones and his Raiders March Theme, it fits him so well, it’s quite militaristic, for his sort of daring side, its heroic sounding but at the same time its light and bouncy and syncopated for his fun side. 00.22.37 ALICE And if you were using library music, okay you might be able to find a piece of music, oh that would fit quite well as a theme, but then you wouldn’t have anyone there to go through the rest of the film and develop that theme because. JOE Yes, no variations. 00.22.50 ALICE No variations, I mean you might have a couple of little variations in the library music kind of stock, but you need somebody there that can develop that theme in different ways to fit exactly with your story. And there’s also timing as well, you might in a couple of places, you get a piece of library music you think oh that fits really well there, but then a bit later on its not necessarily going to fit exactly to the timing of everything that happens. 00.23.18 CHARLES That was Alice Truman explaining to Joe Godwin the advantages of using a composer like her instead of library music for your production, although she did say she also writes library music. You also heard Joe talking to Mark Silk and Neil Hillman, thanks to all of them for some fascinating insights into the world of sound and to the Producers Forum for organising the event. Please join us next week for another Podcast and do have a look at our new BBC Academy Website, where you can find more useful content about production, journalism and media technology. Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook, we’re ‘bbcacademy. For now, from me, Charles Miller, thanks for listening and goodbye. 00.23.58 NARRATOR You’ve been listening to the BBC Academy Podcast, if you want to find out more about this topic or to hear previous shows search online for the BBC Academy. 00.24.06 MUSIC 00.24.13 END OF RECORDING

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