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ah the northern lights
beautiful to see and here
the thing is the northern lights don't
actually make a sound
yet when you watch this clip you don't
think twice about it
in fact if you start to really look and
listen
closely to everything from planet earth
to our planet
you'll notice sounds that would either
be impossible to capture
or ones that are straight up made up
nature documentaries are full of
unnatural sounds
and they're created in post-production
by someone like richard hinton whose job
as a nature doc foley artist
is a study in the subtle art of
exaggeration
so why even create sounds for nature
docs
well shooting in the wild makes it
almost impossible to capture real sound
take this aerial shot of a dolphin pod
in our planet
it was filmed high up in the air by a
drone so while the dolphins are
splashing up and down
all the camera picks up are loud blades
nature docks also frequently utilize
macro lenses
meaning they might actually be shooting
a subject matter that's across a valley
or they'll capture objects normally too
small to have a registered noise to it
that means that sometimes richard and
his team at films at 59
will actually have to fake sounds to
give life to it
you can fill a television screen with a
shot of a spider walking across a web
and there's no sound there obviously and
that can feel a bit
strange or there's a hole in the story
for the hunt he needed to get the sound
of a spider shooting a web
i really like doing stuff like this
because i get can't blanch to be a
little creative because there's no
perceivable sound in nature it means i
can kind of make something up
but while he can make something up he
still needs to match the sound he's
watching on screen
for the web he needed something really
stretchy so he grabbed a slinky
and stretched it out as far as possible
you get that wonderful cable and
attention
now it sounded good when he just
stretched it out between his hands like
you see here
but because the camera was so close he
needed a really close
sound so he applied proximity effect
where the foley artist will make a sound
as close to the mic
as possible it's actually a risky move
the microphone is almost
feeding back on itself because you're
too close to the mic or you're
overloading the mic
but he found the winning noise only by
shoving the slinky
right on top of the mic that proximity
just
pulls you in really tight to the action
than what's going on on the screen
and it just makes it sounds more
unworldly
he didn't just need the web blast he
also had to capture a spider's tiny
footsteps yet another thing in nature
that normally wouldn't have a sound
at least that humans could hear he
needed something more delicate than most
animal footsteps
he started playing with a bunch of
magnetic audio tape
a classic foley technique that can cover
many types of sounds
you could use this but it it sounds too
clumpy
it's not delicate enough it's not
precise enough if i wrap it around the
reel i can use the reel as a sounding
board
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and you can get individual footsteps
close-ups also mean he will need to
exaggerate parts of a larger animal you
wouldn't normally hear a sound from
for example when working on disney's
bears richard needed to capture the
sound of a bear
opening its eye and blinking because a
bear is covered in
fur he first rubbed a piece of fur to
capture the lid opening
but richard actually needed to create
two sounds as he observed that moisture
forms when one opens their eyes
for a wetter sound he relied on his own
mouth
it's when these two sounds are mixed
together that you really hear the lid
opening
the up close and personal presentation
of nature docs is what brings richard to
create some of the most
innovative noises thanks to amazing hd
cameras
time lapse technology has changed what a
nature doc can capture
and we can now witness the entire cycle
of a plant growing
the beauty from my point of view as a
phoenix artist because it is such a
stylized shot
i don't have to think too carefully
about being true to nature
it gives me a certain level of creative
freedom like with the spiderweb
richard needed a stretchy sound for this
shot from planet earth 2
where mushrooms and other fungi spring
from the ground
but he wanted a sound more organic than
a slinky
he first went for a mushy effect with a
wet newspaper
but he needed more control
through this trial and error he found
leather strips and scuba gear were the
only things both stretchy
and controllable enough
to add a little sweetener richard played
around with a wet leather chamois
and this is a particularly useful add
too if you're showing the decay of the
fungus
as well as the growth because usually
they kind of
melt into sticky kind of wet moist
oozy kind of substance
now there are certain things in nature
docs that you wouldn't hear
even if you got up close to it because
they are simply a visual phenomenon
like the northern lights we mentioned
earlier
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for some animal movements there is a
real sound but it's not very pleasant to
listen to
so he needs to create something better
like you did for these underwater shots
in our planet
you don't really hear much sound
underwater although sound travels very
well it's very sh
it become very tiresome to listen to
after about two minutes
your ears will get really tired you
probably turn off so we embellish a
little bit
unsurprisingly he uses real water but
it's how his hands
interact with the water that makes the
difference the smaller the animal the
more delicate you can be
when it gets to more medium-sized fish
like this large shoal of mackerel in our
planet they'll also
dump that clump of magnetic tape into
the tank for an
extra layer of sound
what you can do is you can focus on the
moving
shoal and really focus on those tight
turns and the sharp movements
if there's more than one type of aquatic
animal in the shot richard will
differentiate by doing one take with the
magnetic tape
and one without
for something larger like a whale seen
in this shot he'll both
make his movements larger and go deeper
into the water
there is always extra editing that goes
on after richard is done recording
richard will later apply an eq which
filters out harsher frequency and adds
depth
making it at least feel like it is
really recorded under the ocean
listen to this before
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and after
lava makes a surprisingly soft sound and
when richard had to exaggerate it for
this scene in planet earth 2
he wanted it to have more impact you
kind of hear
the interaction of what it's setting
fire to more than the sound of the larva
creeping
now just the fire crackling doesn't give
much of a sense of the massive scale of
a lava flow
he needed a low end rumble he uses
smaller rocks when making glaciers to
capture the debris
but went for a much larger one here for
this i put some gloves on because
there's real danger of losing your
fingernail
it's a very bassy sound while richard
has a lot of freedom on nature shows and
movies
there's one area he really can't
embellish or exaggerate
there's a lot of science around animal
vocalizations these days
there's a whole range of alarm calls and
distress calls and
greeting calls so we rely very heavily
on
accurate library recordings to make sure
that we're getting it correct but
richard will be brought in for the
vocals you might not think about
such as eating breathing or panting for
our planet
richard was asked to make a very
specific
lip smacking sound from an orangutan as
the actual footage contained crew
members talking in the background
and it gets quite painful if you're
doing that for five minutes but you know
foley is a contact sport and we suffer
for our art
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you