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Six of One

Walter Murch, who worked on George Lucas' THX 1138 discovered the rule of five. In other words you can have up to five separate elements going on, but if you try to layer more than that, the mind just can't keep track.

He discovered this when he was doing the policemen, they have a particular sound for the footsteps. He put a spring on their shoes, so you get this bouncy, springy noise whenever they step. And he was painfully matching the sounds to the feet, and he suddenly realised if there are five or more people, the audience no longer notice whether the footsteps are actually in sync. Unfortunately in Auton there were only three of them, so I had to do each one.. 

I also gave Paul McGann a copy of the music from Storm Warning, but I don't know what he thinks of the first four stories. He certainly seemed to enjoy doing them, he's up for doing more, although the second week of the second season was exhausting on all of us. We were averaging a play at one and a half days. We normally do a play over a weekend, two full days, so it was a very punishing schedule, and if it's a doctor heavy story, like the Dalek one, he's in one hell of a lot of it, so it's quite exhausting for him, for India Fisher, and muggins here in the control room.

The satisfying thing with the dialogue edit, is getting the performance and the pacing of the performance _just_ so.. 

When the Doctor meets Charlie for the first time, that isn't how it was originally recorded. In the finished play it sounds like he's wrong footing her all the time, but the original recording was more like a slow motion tennis match.

It's not just a case of pulling out the gaps, because that would sound artificial, it's a case of mentally imagining where the actors are, what they're doing, and allowing them to breathe as well.

The thing about Foley is it's enormously important, more so I think than on films. At least on film you can see what they're doing.. 

Hollywood has defined our impressions of how things should sound, guns do not sound like they do in real life, they sound like more like cars backfiring. You can't hear peoples footsteps when they're half a mile away from the camera, but on audio it's all you've got, it's vital that you make the sound sound like what they're doing.

Sometimes sound can really work in your favour. The Doctor's might be working with a complex piece of electronic kit which is just my nail clippers and a dog brush, but because he says "Oh, I'm just doing this delicate operation", you think "Oh, that sounds interesting".. 

There's a great sound "cheat" in Terminator 2 for example, when the guy squishes his way through the bars, that's thousands of pounds of CGI on the screen, but what you hear is the sound is the sound of a tin of dog food being emptied.

 

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