34 TVBEurope The Workflow
The sound of natural history documentary
Neal Romanekvisits an award- winning audio post studio to learn how to build and edit natural history TV soundtracks that can win awards
www.tvbeurope.com February 2013
“You should not draw attention to the sound on its own. People shouldn’t realise that it’s shot mute,”
BRISTOL-BASED Wounded Buffalo Sound Studios has been at the forefront of nature documentary sound design since its founding. With its work on landmark series like Planet Earth and Blue Planet, and most recently the BBC’s Africa, it has set the standard for natural history sound.
Sound Editors Tim Owens
and Kate Hopkins started Wounded Buffalo in 1992. Although their work extends across genres, and includes both feature films and TV, the pair’s credits do sometimes read like a ‘best of’ list of the past decade’s nature programming. Owens sees an evolution in sound design that parallels the advance in TV image quality. “It seems like everyone is trying to improve things across the board. I’m amazed at what we’re hearing now, having come through when we used to track lay on magnetic tape. I get the feeling that the viewer has an instinctive response to a quality soundtrack. The average person doesn’t want to be too consciously aware about what the boys in the sound department are doing, but they do respond to it.” This unobtrusive simplicity
has worked well for Wounded Buffalo. Last year, the company added yet another BAFTA and another Emmy to its trophy cabinet for its sound editing on BBC’s Frozen Planet. “There’s a mantra around
here where we say ‘Keep it simple’,” says Owens, “You can actually paint yourself into a corner by getting too tricksy
Wounded Buffalo’s Kate Hopkins and Tim Owens clutch their Emmy trophies for sound editing on BBC’s Frozen Planet
about everything. And frankly, you shouldn’t draw attention to the sound on its own. Our ethos is to make it work but to not draw attention to it. People shouldn’t realise that it’s all shot mute.”
The great ‘spoiler’ of natural history documentary is that most of the soundtrack is built from scratch. Wounded Buffalo is careful to adhere to scientific truth when possible, but there are moments where
entertainment and spectacle demand precedence. The fight between two bull elephants in Africa’s ‘Kalahari’ episode is an example.
an impractical luxury. Africa producers made sure to record both the sound and image for some of their unique discoveries, including a nighttime gathering of rhinos at a watering hole, behaviour never recorded before. “Getting that rhino sound
was really important,” says Hopkins, “In our library we’ve got about three rhino noises. And it turns out their calls are very distinctive. It’s almost a high-pitched whinny that they make, which I’ve never heard before, and has a lot to do with their communication. Because the production crew recorded those in the right place at the
Growing accolades! Wounded Buffalo sound studios has added yet another BAFTA and another Emmy to its trophy collection
Jonny Crew has been with the company eight years, which, in Wounded Buffalo terms, still makes him a relative newcomer. In addition to editing and dubbing, Crew manages technical issues, allowing Owens and Hopkins to concentrate on editing. “When I started at Wounded
Buffalo, we were still editing on AMS’s Audiofile, which was a fantastic bit of kit, but by that point it was already past its sell- by date. We had to go through a phase of trying to work out which way to go. “For a while, the studio had four different things running
“It’s something that people have come to expect. It allows us to hook up with other facilities around the world to record and mix remotely”
“I listened to elephant fights
to prepare,” says Owens, “And they’re mostly silent. But it’s hard to have that when the whole thing is being ramped up with narration and music and the slow-motion spectacle of it. So in that situation, you almost have to put in what the viewer would imagine it to be rather than what it really is.” Africa’s production team did
actually provide Wounded Buffalo with substantial location sound recordings, something unusual in nature documentary production. Sound editors inevitably ask for as much location sound as possible, but for many productions it is
right time, it made it much more interesting.”
Source Connect With sound recording gear much lighter than it has ever been, picking up additional wild sound on location is not as demanding as it was in the pre- digital era. “It used to be, ‘We have all this camera gear, we’re not going to take a Nagra with us too.’ With Africa we had lots of conversations with the producers beforehand and it really worked. Some of these things, I could probably build up out of library tracks, but to have the real thing feels so much fresher.
heard before. And there’s a level of sophistication and detail that’s going into the tracks that Tim and Kate put together that just wasn’t there 20 years ago.” The Wounded Buffalo facility also uses Source Connect, which allows remote recording and monitoring of sound mixes. “It’s become something that people have come to expect. It uses the connectivity of the internet and allows us to hook up with other facilities around the world to record and mix remotely.” Owens’ and Hopkins’ careers
Jonny Crew on Source Connect
while we tried to assess which would be the best. We ended up with Pro Tools because it’s what everybody else uses.” Crew used to have to do a bit of troubleshooting in the early days of Pro Tools, “but now it’s solid, and it’s become routine, much the way Audiofile used to be. Audiofile did one thing, but it did it very well.” Crew says that challenges are
rarely technological anymore, but are more about tight schedules conflicting with the striving for higher and higher quality. “The shows are always pushing the boundaries. There’s so much behaviour that no one’s ever seen before, and never
have spanned the transition from analogue to digital. They note that the infinite flexibility of digital production isn’t always a benefit. In the analogue days of cutting sound on mag, clear decisions had to be made early and often. That film background has helped give the team a “measure twice, cut once” approach. “What’s quite good is the discipline that film gives you,” says Hopkins, “You lay down what you want to hear.” Owens concurs: “We do come
from a background where when you make an edit, you’ve made an edit. There’s no undo button. It’s hard to teach new people that level of decision-making or confidence. We are editors when it comes right down to it and an editor has to make a decision.” For Owens, the ever-rising
expectations put on nature documentaries are what make the job worthwhile. “If we didn’t keep trying to get that level of perfection, it would cease to be fun. A lot of the people I work with really like going to work.”
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