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woodbloke

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I've just had my ghasted totally flabbered last night after watching the latest in the series of FP. When we have to suffer so much garbage these days on the box, it completely vindicates the licence fee. Fantastic viewing =D> =D> =D> - Rob
 
The bloody music gets me down. I don't see why we can't quietly settle in to watch a killer whale eating live penguins and seals without a great brass band accompaniment. Drives yer mad!
 
Jacob":5yp5nair said:
The bloody music gets me down. I don't see why we can't quietly settle in to watch a killer whale eating live penguins and seals without a great brass band accompaniment. Drives yer mad!


Have you not a " Mute " button or " Volume " control #-o
 
Hi, Jacob

You need better speakers than the ones in flat screen TV's.
My TV is routed through the HiFi and sounds very good.


Pete
 
As you say, a super program ruined by the background dirge.
Why should we need to turn the sound off and miss what is
being said. It is supposed to be a nature program so let's just
listen to nature.
Willy.
 
Perhaps it's to cover the sounds of nature. Mostly breaking bones, crunching jaws, general roaring, grunting, whimpering, things groaning as they die of cold, desperate splashing or flapping of wings as things try to escape etc etc.
Must have been like that in the coliseum with all those gladiators and wild beasts :roll:
Violence porn?

PS and then it's the cracking of ice, crashing avalanches, howling of cold winds. Will the pleasure never cease?
 
But that's not the end of it. some bloke or woman is trying
to tell us that the lion is biting the head off of bambi or
some such but we cant hear what is being said because
some tone-deaf twit with a blindfold on and mittens is
crashing around on a piano that needs tuning.
Willy.
 
On the other hand, there are those of us who enjoy all four components -

- the amazing pictures (Rob, you're dead right);
- the appreciative commentary (nobody does it like David Attenborough);
- the carefully matched, atmospheric music to add to the drama; and
- the subtle Foley work to give us the scrunch of snow, the splash of water, the thump of flesh on flesh as the seals fight etc. There's no direct equivalent of a telephoto lens for the sounds, so almost all of it is re-created afterwards - but it's so well done that most people never give it a thought.
 
Andy - definitely correct about the sound track ?
If you watch the follow-on making it series, they are always shouting directions and comments to each other which must have been picked up on the sound tracks?

Rod
 
Harbo":2pkvlpzr said:
Andy - definitely correct about the sound track ?
If you watch the follow-on making it series, they are always shouting directions and comments to each other which must have been picked up on the sound tracks?

Rod


Exactly - which shows that the 'live' sound is not used - we get something much better!
 
AndyT":kitcymt8 said:
- the subtle Foley work to give us the scrunch of snow, the splash of water, the thump of flesh on flesh as the seals fight etc. There's no direct equivalent of a telephoto lens for the sounds, so almost all of it is re-created afterwards - but it's so well done that most people never give it a thought.

It's come a bit late in life, but it's nice to be (not) noticed :)

One minor point of detail m'lud: it's "spot FX" in't BBC.
"Foley" is mainly for them colonials.

Cheers,

E.
(who spent a disproportionate amount of his youth "being" animals for various Attenborough series, etc.)
 
Eric - happy to be corrected - please tell us more!
Is this also the reason why you sometimes look a bit black and hairy? :wink:
 
You men all that grunting and groaning is done by actors? :shock:
Hmm could be a job in it - I can do a brilliant rutting wildebeest.
 
T'was a long time ago in a happier world:

My first long-term job in the Beeb (as a sprog of only just eighteen) was "Life on Earth", initially machine-minding for twelve-hour days, after a while I was allowed to do spot. Huge fun, and you got paid for it, too!

Doing stuff to picture could be really "interesting". To save time we'd try to do long takes, so you had to remember the movements, a bit like learning a piece of music. If it was complicated, you'd sometimes get two people, each pretending to be one whatever-it-was. You can just about manage to be one four-legged thing at a time, but if there are several it gets too complicated for one person. The worst bits were fighting animals, as the action was usually unpredictable and if you didn't nail the timing spot on it just looked silly.

If you ever see a re-run of the series "The British Isles," the golden eagle in the title sequence is actually my umbrella. Apparently it was really tame (the eagle, that is), but to get it to land on cue, the owner kept yelling at it!

I have to say the stuff we did in the late 1970s was really primitive. The dubbing theatre we had (a "Keller") could only run a maximum of four tracks at once, so you'd end up doing loads of premixes so that you eventually had enough space for a final mix. It used to break down often, which used to annoy a certain famous person particularly.

I also did the first ever nat. hist. TV prog. in stereo: Dilys Breese's "Nightlife". We had more tracks by then, but our sound desk was officially mono, so a lot of strange temporary re-wiring happened. My senior colleague, Pete Copeland, did the mix, and I worked the pan pots to move the sound effects left-right to match the picture. There were several sequences (a sequence of a fox in a hen house comes to mind) where we had to have several goes because we kept getting in each other's way - like a four-handed piano duet gone wrong.

I also remember spending half a day throwing myself around inside a laundry basket. They told me it was to represent Attenborough and Don Cameron doing some Nat. Hist. at high altitude in a balloon (don't ask!), but I think they just wanted me out of the way for a bit!

And yes, snow isn't snow, and horses hooves often are coconuts (but it's harder than you might imagine), and gents and ladies' shoes really do sound different.

If the editor was lazy, or the budget was too tight for an assistant film editor, it wasn't uncommon for films to arrive in dubbing with big gaps in the soundtrack, so we used to play in a lot of effects off discs. That could get interesting - none of this twin-turntable "DJ scratching" nonsense - we had five grams for one person to look after, plus three tape machines, often all running simultaneously and at different speeds. If you made a mistake it was quite a rigmarole setting everything up again. My tour de force was an entire mute cricket over for schools telly, entirely off disc, complete with 'oohs' and 'ahs' from the crowd, the thwack of the bat and subsequent applause - they'd 'forgotten' to track-lay anything!

I also used to do a lot of live regional TV news. In my early days, when it was still film, items were often shot entirely mute, and sound effects were played in live off disc and tape. If the story was late there was often a breathless film editor standing behind you to cue in a passing bus or similar.

Happy days, but sadly many of the bright lights are going out now...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/oct/17/guardianobituaries.media
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Copeland

Cheers,

E.

Homework: how did the BBC end up with a sound effects record of a French guillotine? :)
 
Eric The Viking":36qpt84c said:
Homework: how did the BBC end up with a sound effects record of a French guillotine? :)


i'm sure it involves chopping a cabbage - no idea how you'd get the sound of the falling/sliding blade though

jim
 
blurk99":2h61ezm4 said:
Eric The Viking":2h61ezm4 said:
Homework: how did the BBC end up with a sound effects record of a French guillotine? :)


i'm sure it involves chopping a cabbage - no idea how you'd get the sound of the falling/sliding blade though

jim

Jim,

Roller skates down a wooden board.

John
 
Even mundane stuff often sounds 'better' if you contrive something, rather than use the real thing: I still have a modified bicycle pump somewhere that was used as a champagne cork pop, and everyone knows about 'marching boxes'. With practice you can get the whole regiment to do an about turn and go off in the other direction (but stragglers are difficult to manage though).

Radio drama is fun, because it's less pressured than TV and the pictures are so much better. I once did a nightmare scene based on the Nuremburg executions (post WWII), in a cellar, with a prop sound FX door laid across two chairs, and a packet of celery (that useless vegetable, which no horror movie should be without!). The rest of the crew said it put them off their lunch.

I also once got told off in a radio play, by an actor (a local chap who taught at one of the local drama schools). It was a party scene, with the cast 'ensemble'. According to BBC-Equity agreements only proper 'Ecktorrrs' are supposed to make vocal noises. Studio managers could do the sound effects, but no 'murmuring' - "don't get above yourself, laddie!".

On the whole though, I found actors fun to work with, and almost all of them have a good sense of humour.

Guillotine: getting warmer, but roller skates not involved. I've never seen it actually done in a real play (coz there's that record!), but it was used an exercise in training. To get the proper sound involves several people usually, and some choreography...

Bedrooms? Never for TV, otherwise, I'm not telling!!
 
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