99% Invisible - 256- Sounds Natural

Episode Date: April 19, 2017

In most wildlife films, the sounds you hear were not recorded while the cameras were rolling. Most filmmakers use long telephoto lenses to film animals, but there’s no sonic equivalent of a zoom lens. Good audio requires a microphone close … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1999, a nature documentary about wolves, called wolves, came out in IMAX theaters. This alpha female is searching for a den site. It isn't merely a personal choice, or her decision will determine the disposition of the path. The film documents the reintroduction of wolves across the Western United States. That's producer Emmett Fitzgerald. And it has everything you want in a nature documentary. Sweeping landscapes, a narrator with a rugged yet soothing voice.

A potential prey. And best of all, wolf puppies. The film was designed to combat the misinformation campaigns of the launching and hunting lobbies, which portray wolves typically as vicious killers fit only for elimination. That's Chris Palmer, one of the film's producers. He and his team wanted to rehabilitate the wolf's image by showcasing the relationships within a pack. Rather than just a bunch of scenes of wolves ripping caribou de shreds, they wanted to

show the animals working together to raise a litter of pups. Our goal was to show closeups of a wolf pack interacting in complex subtle ways. But filming the intimate lines of Wild Wolves is virtually impossible because they do not tolerate the presence of people. Still they filmed inside a wolf's den and in the finished movie viewers are led into this private moment as wolf pups cozy up against their wolf's den. And in the finished movie, viewers are led into this private moment as wolf pups cozy up against their mother's belly. Because newborn pups have no way

to regulate their own temperature. Their mother's body heat is the only thing that keeps them warm. When the film came out, Palmer went to some screenings where audience members could ask questions. And after one screening, someone in the audience asked me, how did you film the amazing shot of the mother wolf in its den?

Palmer's heart sank. Because the truth about that intimate scene in the wolf den wasn't pretty. Come here ears and a simpleist nurse. We rented captive wolves. We rented captive wolves. We rented captive wolves. The shots of the puppies in the den were not filmed in the wild. Instead, the film crew had gone to a game farm where the wolves were more used to humans

and built an artificial den with cameras inside. I was suddenly staring, starkly, at an ethical dilemma for myself. Did I tell the truth and answer truthfully, therefore betraying our trade secrets and filmmaking, or did I continue to lie and pretend that the captive wolves were, in fact, were wild when they weren't? Palmer decided to come clean. And when I did this, I could feel the

audience's disappointment. And this moment was a bit of a turning point for him. Up to that point, I think I kind of have a scene where why would they care? But they do care. People do care. When people watch documentaries, especially science-based documentaries, they are assuming they are seeing the truth. They are seeing things that are authentic and genuine and truthful. And when they find out that is not the case, they get very upset. Of course, there's some level of illusion

in all filmmaking. You're editing footage to form a narrative. Psst, we do this in radio too. But illusions in nature documentaries exist on a spectrum. In some cases, these illusions help tell the truth about animals. But in others, not so much. On the far end of that truth spectrum, you know, over toward the straight up false end,

is a film called White Wilderness. I still remember watching White Wilderness as a child when I was about 11 years old. It was a documentary produced by Disney in 1958 about the high Arctic. In this land of many mysteries, it's a strange fact that the largest legends seem to collect around the smallest creatures. One of these is a nasty little rodent called the lemming. In one scene, a herd of tiny lemmings approaches a rocky cliff along the ocean. They reach the final precipice. This is the last chance to turn back.

The little fur balls peer over the edge, and then... They get over they go, casting themselves bodily out into space. They hurl themselves off the cliff and into the water below. The narrator tells us that most have survived the plunge, but then they begin to swim towards the horizon. It's dramatic stuff, except this entire sequence was staged. The producers went to the Arctic, bagged up a bunch of lemmings, and flew them to this cliff along a river in Alberta.

And they put them on a turntable that you don't see in the film, and they threw them off the cliff side into the water and filmed it. And Lemmings don't actually hurl themselves off cliffs. Some Lemmings species do experience traumatic fluctuations in population size, leading to some creative 19th century hypotheses about what might be going on. But the idea of a mass Lemmings suicide ritual is entirely apocryphal. of a mass-lemming suicide ritual is entirely apocryphal. White wilderness didn't invent the lemming suicide myth, but it certainly helped to spread it. The film was seen by millions of people. It even won the Oscar for Best Documentary. Everybody has learned that from that film and been mess led by it. So what we put in these

films is importance, and that means they is so important that they are made not only entertainingly, but made accurately and ethically, because they do have an impact. The Lemming scene is an especially egregious example of dishonest filmmaking, but smaller acts of deception happen all the time. And after his experience with the Wolf documentary, Chris Palmer started looking into this stuff.

He found filmmakers learning sharks closer to the camera by dumping buckets of fish guts into the ocean and a producer using CGI to edit a sea otter into a shot. Palmer is particularly bothered by filmmakers that harass animals to try to get them to do something exciting. He thinks all this happens because of a race for ratings. And when you focus so much on race like that, you inevitably move towards programs that

are highly sensational and overly dramatic. A lot of Palmer's criticisms have to do with the visual side of filmmaking, but any conversation about the accuracy of nature documentaries inevitably ends up on the topic of sound. That's because in most wildlife films, the sounds you hear were not recorded while the cameras were rolling. Which makes sense if you think about how different the two technologies are. Most filmmakers use really long telephoto lenses to film animals from a safe distance. But there's no sonic equivalent of a zoom lens.

For good audio, you need to get a microphone really close to the source of the sound, which can be difficult or dangerous to try and pull off while the cameras are rolling. You can't just walk up to a lion and clipple a pelmike on its mane. And so many of the subtle movement sounds, a chimpanzee rustling through leaves or a hippo squelching in the muck, they don't come from animals at all. They're made by fully artists. So a folios is to basically perform all that movement sound or a film essentially. This is Richard Hinton. Yeah, I sit in this wind-elless room,

watching it to television, making weird sounds for animals. Hinton performs in a studio with trap doors in the floor. And underneath the floor, you have six pits, each filled with the different material. He says, fully artist spends so much time playing around in these pits that they call each other pit monkeys. There's one gravel, one's filled with sand, one's full of dirt, one's kind of dirt and grass,

and then one's a solid stone slab. Each pit is miked up for high quality sound. Hinton watches a silent version of the scene on an HD screen, and he tries to match the movement of the animals. Usually I'm sat on the floor, cross-legged, and I'm kind of lent over the pit, so I can control my weight and the amount of weight that I'm putting into the movement. He starts with the feet. As the animals move, he tries to match their footfalls with his hands.

When you're following animals, you usually use your hands rather than your feet because you have more control. If it's hooves, I'll, you know, I'll use the tips of my fingers and I'll really drive them into the surface so you get that hard attack. If it's something like a lion, then I'll use the flash of my fingers and you get a more paddy, you know, kind of stealthy, kind of stalking, kind of weight to it. Hinton has been doing fully for years and has worked on many big nature documentaries, including Planet Earth 2. With all that practice, he says he can often get it right in just a single take. With all that practice, he says he can often get it right in just a single take. I've been doing it long enough now to know, you know, that point at which a cheater's

about to go from a stalk to a sprint because of its shoulder movement and the just the way it pins its ears back. And, you know, the more of this stuff that you do, you start picking up on these little visual clues that all wildlife gives you in terms of what it's about to do with its behavior. So many wildlife films focus on the exact same cast of marquee species, like elephants, leopards, crocodiles, that hadn't rarely comes across footage of an animal he's never fully before. When you first come across something you haven't done, you do spend a couple of minutes just watching the footage through, seeing, right, okay, well, how is this thing moving? How, you know, what's its

rhythm? How's it where it shoulders working in relationship to its feet? For more complicated sounds, Hinton has a giant storage area full of materials he's hoarded over the years. Sheets of metal, pieces of rubber, different types of rope. We've got a couple of old wet suits. He takes out a couple of items to demonstrate. In front of me right now, I have some backwings, which was actually just a pair of old gloves. Interestingly, if you use the finger tips,

you get backwings. If you flip them over and use the bit you put your hand in, you get back wings. If you flip them over and use the bit you put your hand in, you get pigeon wings. To mimic the sound of an animal walking on snow, Hinton uses a bag of dried custard. When he squeezes the bag, you get that fresh snow crunch. Sometimes he brings in natural materials from the outdoors. The studio has a big garden and in the summer, Hinton will harvest different plants to use in his recordings. The winter, though, can be more challenging. What we'll quite often do is we'll use some old tape. Here I have a combination of some old quarter inch tape, some old VHS tape, it's

quite good for kind of leaf canopy work. For example if you have something like a baboon or a chimp and they're clashing about in a tree top. Fully artists share techniques with each other, and some tricks have become so ubiquitous that they've actually changed our understanding of the way nature sounds. I mean, this is the thing. We've been doing phony on that history for so long. What people actually are used to listening to is how we phony stuff, which is kind of weird, so people expect what we do rather than what nature might actually do in real life. For example, elephant feet.

We expect to hear a big booming sound when a massive elephant foot hits the ground. But that's not what elephants actually sound like. If ever you talk to anybody that works around elephants, they will tell you that elephants make pretty much no sound at all when they walk, because the bottom sort of like section of their foot is just one big fatty cushion. So they're incredibly efficient at distributing their weight as they walk. But Hinton says that if you had no sound at all, it would just feel weird. It's very uncomfortable to see a foot, the size of an elephant, fill a screen and hit

floor and not hear a sound for it. Hinton tries to find a middle ground between accuracy and giving people the sound they expect. But he says the main goal of Foley is just to provide a little bit of that movement sound needed to help the film flow. Movement sounds are one thing, but then there's the distinctive vocal sounds that an animal makes. You know, a lion's roar or a cuckoo bird's cuckoo.

Anything that you would term as a vocalization, I growl, the grunt, scream, a roar, a bird call, it's all gonna be as real as we can get it. But just because it's accurate doesn't mean that you're hearing the exact same individual animal that you're seeing on the screen. Unless you can see David Attenborough kneeling next to an orangutan, chances are the sounds that orangutan is making come from a different orangutan altogether. Many sound studios have massive carefully cataloged libraries of animal recordings that sound editors will use to match the specific behavior seen on screen.

And sometimes filmmakers will hire sound recordists to go out and find sounds to fit their film. Recordists like Chris Watson. My name is Chris Watson and I'm a sound recordist. Watson usually gets a storyboard from the filmmakers, and it's his job to go and find sounds that match different scenes. If he's working on a lion sequence, Watson will find a pride he wants to record

and carefully study their movements. And then realizing, you know, when they're off hunting or when they've gone to another location, you then go and rig your microphones close by where you saw them. They use very long cables and I conceal or disguise microphones near the source of the sound. Then Watson climbs into a hiding place, a safe distance away and waits. It might take you two days, but then eventually that pride, three or four females and nine, ten,

or dozen cubs will come back to that place and just lay down right in front of your microphones and start vocalizing. Watson takes big predators like these very seriously and he has all kinds of techniques for getting close-up sound without getting too close. He wants to used a really long boom to get his microphone near a cheetah resting beneath a tree. And I, over about an hour, very slowly lowered the boom down to within about three feet of this animal's head. And then I recorded this remarkable close-up, purring sound, which wasn't even audible

where we were 10-12 yards away. Watson also records lots of ambient sounds, and then he sends it all to the editors who carefully piece together an accurate soundscape. In the final product, it looks like the vocalizations are coming from the animals on screen. When he can, though, Watson does try to record sound while the cameras are rolling. Synchronous sound is not impossible, he says, and it can bring a special kind of realism to the film. In the BBC documentary The Life of Birds, the director asked him to mic up a bunch of trees and bushes where he knew songbirds like the sing at dawn, and it worked. The bird showed up right on cue and sang right into his tiny microphones as they filmed.

In the early morning light you can see the birds, breath as they exhale from the song. Recording synchronous sound is much easier with bluebirds than say polar bears, but Watson wishes it happened more. He says that in general producers prioritize sites above sounds. They'll spend millions of dollars sending camera people all over the world to get that special shot. And then just worry about finding the right sound later on. Sometimes though, recording the sound separately can actually enhance the accuracy of the soundtrack. In the BBC documentary Life in the Undergrowth, the filmmakers wanted to showcase this bizarre behavior of the Alcon Blue Butterfly caterpillar. Would ants mistake these caterpillars for their own larvae and carry them underground to the ant colony?

Once inside, the caterpillars do something remarkable. They stimulate an internal organ, thinking it's about 300 hers. I had to look up Strygillate too. It means to make a shrill sound by rubbing the legs, wings, or other parts of the body together. In this case, it's the caterpillar's attempt to mimic a hungry baby ant. This sound stimulates the ants to feed the caterpillar. So it's cross species communication, which is actually something very special in the first place. The filmmakers would destroy the ant nest if they tried to film this in the wild,

so they established a colony inside a film set and filled it with tiny periscope cameras. And to capture the sound, Chris Watson used what's called a particle velocity microphone, which can record extremely quiet sounds. And I have to go into a BBC radio studio, very, very, very quiet place. And I had a selection of these caterpillars, which are then placed on this particle velocity microphone about the size of a, imagine like a P,

that sort of diameter, but it's flat. This animal was placed on top and eventually produced this vibration which I recorded. One of the most astonishing sounds and bits of behaviour that I've ever witnessed but it would have been impossible to record it under wild conditions, as indeed it was impossible to film the behavior under wild conditions. Both Chris Watson, the sound recordist and Richard Hinton, the fully artist, work to give us accurate and satisfying sounds, albeit in different ways.

But Watson says there's something inherently artificial in the process of making nature films. Native documentaries are not reality. It's the creation of an illusion like any other piece of entertainment. But a lot of viewers get upset when they find out that their favorite nature documentary isn't totally real. Richard Hinton, the foliartist, says he gets reactions like this all the time. You know, when I tell people what I do for a living, people are either fascinated or they want to punch me in the face. Don't punch Richard Hinton in the

face. I cannot stress this enough people. Discovering all the work that goes into the final product should not tarnish it. Nature documentaries are still movies, and they need a little movie magic, just like any other film. Chris Palmer, the filmmaker from the beginning of the story, says the most important thing is that the movie magic is being used to tell the truth. He actually thinks that renting wolves,

like he did to show viewers how they behave in their dens, was probably fine. Palmer says if he had to show viewers how they behave in their dens was probably fine. Palmer says if he had to do it over, he'd likely do it the same way, but make it clear to the audience somehow that the scene was not recorded in the wild. Palmer thinks a lot of documentary filmmakers are doing their best to bring us accurate representations of animals in the wild, but he does see one big problem. Even some of the best work out there fails to acknowledge human impacts on ecosystems. Which is giving the impression that we don't have any environmental challenges.

Palmer says that a lot of nature documentaries these days show animals as if they live in some magical fantasy world, completely divorced from human civilization. There's no shots of the nearby city, or the coal mine that's encroaching on Habitat. You know, you watch the shows and you think there was nothing wrong with the world, nothing wrong. Which is its own form of deception. When you make a film about the natural world to omit any mention of the environmental challenges faced by that natural world is misleading.

But Palmer still believes in the power of good filmmaking. He thinks that if we want to solve big environmental challenges like species extinction and climate change, we need compelling true stories about nature. And to tell a true story, sometimes you need a little fakery. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald with Sharif Yusuf, Delaney Hall, Avery Truffleman, and me Roman Mars. Katie Mingle is our senior editor Kurt Colstead, is the digital director and Terran Mazza is the Baroness. All the music was composed by Sean Rihon. We are a project of 91.7K, all W in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row, in Vietaful, downtown, Oakland, California.

You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, I tweet at Roman Mars, the show tweets, at 99Pi or we're on Instagram and Tumblr too. But if you want to know what the word, Scarcatecter means, you have to go to 99pi.org. Radio TIPI from P-R-X. you