On Location - inside the R101

On the master dialogue DATs, you can always hear that the actors are all standing in a studio, all very comfortable with their scripts. There's no tension, unless we're running out of time. While you're in a studio there are no audio visual aids to help you, it is all down to your own imagination. All the audience will hear is the voice, so actors have got to express everything through the voice, in the same way that you can hear Tony Blackburn's smile.

We were recording a play, and I remember the director saying "You need to sound happy", and the girl was acting her little heart out, and beaming away, but she sounded like one of her relatives had died that morning. 

Once you've got the performance, you've got to position them and make them sound like they're in a location, so if we were in this pub I'd think "What's the acoustic in this room", and try to give a flavour of that. 

So when the location is established the first time, you can hear that you're in this room, and then as the audio camera comes in closer, I might pull that reverb out, if, say, two characters lean towards each other and whisper, and then come back, the reverb will come out for that, and then go back in. 

If two people are whispering in a church, you're not going to hear their voices echoing all over the church, but if they're shouting at each other, you will. 

All these cues that tell the listener where you are, but nothing remains static. I have to know when to pull those noises out or lower them. So I'd establish a noisy pub, but if I let the level of the noisy punters stay up all the way through the scene, it would become incredibly tiring to listen to. So as it goes I'll just cheat it down a bit, and then maybe at the end of a scene I'd cheat it back up again, because the next location might be quiet, and I might want to point out that comparison. 

In episode two of Storm Warning an alarm bell goes off, initially it sounds very loud, and the bell continues until they go to another location. If I was to leave that going at its initial level it would soon be incredibly annoying, so I just cheat it down as the scene goes on. 

Likewise, when they go down a long metal staircase, you hear "Ker-klonk, ker-klonk". Throughout the conversation the footsteps are gradually cheated down in level. 

I may want the actors to sound like they're in an immense environment, but I don't want them to sound like they're that far away from the microphone. I want them to sound like they're on location, but again if I were to leave a huge reverb on the voices for the whole scene, it would become incredibly tiring. The reverb is still there, but it is no longer important..