Pat Heigham

Creating sound effects where none exist in the BBC library was a bit challenging!

On a “Steptoe and Son”, I had to engineer a ‘water hammer’ as Harold had got a load of central heating plumbing and was going to install it in the house. But he got an air leak, leading to the ‘hammer’. The only way, I reckoned, was to gently tap my home system pipes with a muffled hammer, with the mic aimed at another point of the system.

All going well, except I had omitted to tell my father what I was up to (I lived at home). What the ……..! However he was very good about it, and I got him and mum tickets for the actual studio recording, and it provided stories in his local pub, afterwards. Oh! And drilling holes in his garage wall for another play.

Another difficult one was very much facilitated by Nick Ware, whose brother-in-law was Barry Rose, Organist and Choirmaster at Guildford Cathedral. I needed a recording of a peal of eight bells with the third one missing. (A character wakes up on a Sunday, hears the bells not right, and realises that he isn’t there to yank his bell rope).

It being impossible to edit out a single bell, it had to be a special recording, which via Barry, was set up with the Cathedral bellringers one practice night! A separate take of the missing bell was then laid up in sync on the second ¼”track, which was brought in when the guy eventually makes it to the bell tower.

 

Nick Ware

Thanks for crediting me with facilitating the Bell story. Guildford Cathedral was certainly Barry’s and my recording playground after hours, and St Paul’s for 11 years after that.

A mutual friend and I were working on a film that had nothing to do with the BBC (surely not? I hear you say). We needed the engine room sound effect of the Tower Bridge lifting machinery (steam if I remember right). It was needed fairly urgently, but we were told it took at least two weeks to apply for, and get permission to do it. And even then, it could only be at a time that wouldn’t disrupt the traffic passing over it.

As luck would have it, there actually was a BBC sound fx disc of it in the Gram Library. So we took it to his Putney riverside flat (Windows open for authentic background atmos), and when the Nagra was running, he idented the ‘take’ thus:

“Right, so here we are in the engine room at Tower Bridge, and this is the sound of it going up – Take 1.” – – “OK, mate, take it up!”

I cued the fx disc on Bob’s Hi-Fi, and no-one was ever any the wiser.

You probably could record a peal of eight bells today and edit it to leave out a bell etc with modern technology. 

 

Alan Taylor

Having fun – instead of recording sound effects.

The first drama I did where I had responsibility as a sound supervisor was a play called "Sudden Wrench". The plot revolved around a bored housewife who took a job as a plumber’s mate and rose above all the hassles that came with a woman doing a "Man’s job".

Some scenes were shot on a building site and it was arranged to shoot on a Sunday when the site was not working.  Genuine builders came in and doubled as extras, operating or driving machinery in the background. The day was hectic, with an optimistic schedule and it came as no surprise when we didn’t keep up with that schedule.  We were so pushed for time that doing wild tracks was simply not possible, but I had been assured by the site project supervisor that if we returned the next day, he would make sure that I got clean recordings of everything I wanted.

The next afternoon was scheduled to be quite a straightforward shoot with no need for two boom operators. I handed Joe Driver the Nagra together with a comprehensive list of wanted wild tracks.  Joe had been a good friend for many years. He wasn’t the sort of person to let anybody down.  Joe loaded up his car, set off for the building site and I didn’t expect to see him for a few hours.

However at that time Joe had a girlfriend who lived nearby and craftily decided to visit her before recording the wild tracks.  Nobody would be any the wiser if he said that it took him all afternoon to make those recordings. Unfortunately, after he had finished having his fun, he arrived at the building site to discover that it was locked up and deserted.  Construction workers like to pack up at four o clock and go home. Joe was devastated and wondered how on earth he might talk his way out of that. By a stroke of good fortune, the project manager had spotted Joe arriving, opened up the site and started up each machine for him to record.  He ended up with much better recordings than we could ever have hoped for.

The first drama I ever did was "The Bell", where Ian Leiper and myself were each responsible for half of the series.  There was a scene in a carriage on a steam railway which would need a lot of editing, with the associated problems of maintaining continuity of the railway track noises in the background.  I could see that I would need wild tracks covering every type of sound made as the carriage went into and out of tunnels, over points and along smooth sections, with variants for different speeds too.  There was no way I would be given the opportunity to gather all those sounds, so instead I arranged to seal off the adjacent compartment to the one we were filming in and set up microphones in there.  Whenever we recorded a shot, I also ran a timecode Nagra and recorded a simultaneous clean recording of the rail FX which matched what was happening in our compartment.  During the dub, locating the correct spot in all those hours of tape could have been a tedious process.  However the production assistant had been primed to keep a note of the original timecodes from the VT for each shot and it was a simple matter to get the Sypher 1/4"  tape recorder to auto-spool to the correct point whenever we needed to smooth over an edit. By adding exactly the right sound and in sync, we only needed just enough effects to smooth the transition, which helped to keep the dialogue distinct and well separated from the background.

 

Dave Wagner

I think I was gram op for the dub for this and having seen what would be need was in despair.

However when it came to the dub all the wild tracks were there and labelled and perfect for what was needed and so in Sypher 1 I did my first OB drama Dub – but I don’t think Alan knew how inexperienced I was.

It was a lovely drama and has stuck in my mine ever since.

 

Alan Taylor

Yes Dave, you were the gram op and you did brilliantly.  I recently wrote that I was totally out of my depth doing my first Sypher dub and got so far behind on the day one that I didn’t think there was any way we would complete it in time, but with masses of encouragement from Jon Amiel the director, a first class effort from you and more than a little luck, we got it all done.

I certainly never imagined you were inexperienced. Your posting just now was the first clue that you were a newbie.

My approach has always been to try and get as much material as possible recorded prior to the dub because if we don’t find what we need in the FX library, there are few further choices, nor much time to do anything about it.  I never got anywhere close to doing a drama without spinning in a single library disk, but I sometimes ended up using remarkably few.

As far as I’m aware, none of my location recordings found their way onto FX disks.  Part of the reason might be the flippant or quirky titles I gave those recordings.  My favourite explosion was given the title “Grade 1 listed building being inadvertently wrecked by special effects dept”. It was Eastnor Castle and SFX had previously carried out some impressive explosions on the top of a turret.  The next sequence was essentially the same, but in a passageway beneath the turret.  They used an identical explosive charge. I’m no expert in pyrotechnics, but I did know that explosives have more effect in confined spaces.  

When detonated, it blew out a window and lifted the flooring of the first floor.  I recorded it as a twin track recording, one microphone close up and the other being a fairly distant gun mic pointed at the hills to get the reverberation, which is what makes it sound loud.  Judicious mixing from one track to the other gives a sharp detonation with a massive explosion.  The close up mic needed to be whipped out a moment after the detonation and then up again a split second later in order to hear the broken glass and falling masonry, but lose some robust Anglo Saxon vocabulary used by the spark who had been stood on the afore mentioned first floor, adjacent to the afore mentioned former window.