How String and Tins Soundtracked British Culture for Channel 4
Mike Skrgatic from Time Based Arts and Lynsey Atkin from 4 Creative approached me about curating the sound for this body of work at the beginning of the year. Can we help create 25 distinct worlds that are inextricably linked by a motion control system, each world being a different perspective of British culture, life and our environment? Yes please 🙂
The project promised to be of considerable sonic scale, with many moving parts, yet at its core always celebrating creativity and authenticity. A rare thing. We at String and Tins are a creative led team of sound designers and composers - we love challenging VFX projects where we get to collaborate as a collective and share ideas / workflow tips internally. This was extremely rewarding for me to supervise as every member of our sound design team worked on at least one of the 25 films, with myself guiding the work and finally bringing all these individual sound worlds together in a final mastering session to create all the transition effects and final elements.
To kick off the sound while the visual ideas were starting to be brought together during the previs stage, myself, Laura-Leigh our EP and Mike Skrgatic had initial brainstorming sessions where we planned out how to maximise the contrast between each world sonically, while also considering potential threads between the worlds that we could lean on for the transitions. For example the white noise of the rough sea and how that might morph into the hot air fan, or the subtle moth flying through the graveyard and how that sound might tie into the moths in the glass box. These initial notes were shared with the directors and fed into their productions. We then set up zoom calls with each director to get their thoughts on the creative and introduce them to the team, but also to start planning for on set sound for each shoot.
We knew having spoken to production about the motion control system that on set sound capture would be challenging. But we wanted to use sound from the actors where relevant, and we need at least to have production sound if we wanted it for the sake of authenticity, and a guide for possible ADR and foley. So we made a plan for the sound recordists to capture whatever they could within the time they had.
A hugely important part of the project for us was to push technical boundaries and maximise the potential for immersion - it might seem counterintuitive but getting good production sound was a big step in the right direction. The films were shot in two blocks, a number of days in London in the studio, and a further number of days on location in Scotland. I wrote up briefing documents for the two sound recordists, with detail on which actors we would want isolated radio microphones re: possible dialogue, potential sound effect wild tracks etc.
In addition to the sync sound dealt with by the production, I wanted us to experiment with a super wide range microphone from Sanken that extends the potential frequency capture 5x beyond what human ears can hear. My colleague Kaspar Broyd brought this microphone on set and recorded the glass sound that features in the ‘Shattering Room’ film. As this was shot at such a high frame rate, only this microphone would be able to recreate that footage when played at 25fps with a fidelity that still contained full bandwidth audio once slowed down 5x. As we had hired the microphone anyway, we did a side project with it at our studios, recording everything we could get our hands on to add to our own design library, from throwing dice to slide guitars to bodily functions, vocals and beyond.
Once the shoots were completed and we started getting the selects through from production, each member of our team started work on the design and testing music options per film. These wips were shared with the directors and a number of rounds of options and revisions were worked through.
As the final stitches started to come together from Time Based Arts, I began collating all the audio from the films into a master session. One challenge for myself and Mike Skrgatic was to take all these beautifully individual pieces of work and make them work as a whole. My favourite section was perhaps the most tricky in terms of getting the tone right - up until the last we were struggling to make the music work for ‘Dinner Party’. Dan Tobin Smith wanted the music to be strong enough to project the right message for the piece but not so much that it stuck out like a sore thumb. Eventually rather than obvious foley and sound effects, we settled on Joe’s tasteful musical sound design for the impacts on the 4 logo, combined with my reworking of Toccata and Fugue by Bach. By reprogramming this piece of Bach I was able to merge its incoming pitch with the previous scene, and hopefully seamlessly dissolve it into the Zoroastrian Ritual film... which incidentally is a beautiful performance captured on set by Saman the director and his team, carefully pitched and augmented by Jim Stewart on the buttons our side.
The most memorable part of the project for me was recording the poignant spoken words written and performed by John Joseph Holt for the launch film. He gave meaning to the project that until that session I hadn’t properly realised. Huge respect to John, Mike and all at Time Based Arts, and the 4 Creative team for bringing this body of work together in the form of the launch film with such honesty and passion.
All nine members of our sound design team worked on this project, from our most senior engineers through to our newest talent, including: myself, Lawrence Kendrick, Adam Smyth, Culum Simpson, Mike Bamford, Kaspar Broyd, Jim Stewart, Joe Wilkinson and Adam Hare, congratulations to you all for your inspiring work, led so well by our fantastic production team headed up by Laura-Leigh Smith and Rachel Hough.
