Examination of Witnesses (Questions 5340
- 5348)
5340. Do you get international companies coming
to your studios, for example American companies?
(Mr Taylor) Yes. If you look at GCS IDT-7 that
is one of our studios—in fact the west bound tunnel, I believe
it is, passes directly underneath that studio.[60]
On the screen is a Nike advert. We all know that Nike
make trainers and they are a huge, worldwide brand. We work for
Nike and for various other international brands, via their
advertising agencies—we never work directly, always via
an advertising agency. Inside our facility we get representatives
from Nike coming in to listen and to approve their commercials
for cinema release in Europe. We have done work for cinema releases
worldwide—America is an emerging market—and it goes
into America as well. In America the cinema commercial is almost
non-existent; it is the very, very early start of it. When they
started doing commercials in American cinemas people would walk
out and complain it was an intrusion—that they had not paid
to see the commercial, they had paid to see the film—and
they would leave. So America is a huge emerging market that is
just starting to arrive. One of the reasons why we have committed
as a company so heavily to having the cinema classrooms is that
the American market and the world market will mature as digital
cinema arrives and that will make it very, very easy to put commercials
into cinemas. Whether one likes it or not is a different issue,
but that is the market that will grow enormously, and we have
positioned our company to be in a position where as it emerges
we are in an ideal position to take advantage of it, and that
is a UK issue, a European issue and a worldwide issue.
5341. For example the Americans, when they instruct
you to do work, are they interested in whether or not you have
a Dolby licence?
(Mr Taylor) To be blunt you would never get
asked the question directly, because the people we are talking
to are booking the studios. If you go to Dolby's website you will
see who are approved studios or otherwise. I am quite sure that
all of our major clients who would be looking to do cinema releases
will have checked or had assurances or asked us in one way or
another whether we have a Dolby licence. If we attempted to do
this work for Nike for example, and we did not have a Dolby
licence, or they found that our licence was invalid or had lapsed
or been rescinded then we would be in the position of having to
put out a commercial, Dolby would refuse to do the transfers—which
is what would happen—and then Nike would miss all
of the dates in the cinema and we would be very rapidly out of
business—it is as simple as that.
5342. Whilst that slide is up on the screen
can you outline to us what we are looking at there and what you
do and cross referencing that to slide 6.[61]
That is a booth, is that right?
(Mr Taylor) That is the voice
over booth; that is the voice over booth in studio 8 which is
the booth that goes with the studio in the next slide.
5343. Just tell the Committee of the lengths
you instruct your designers to go to in order to create the environment
that has to pertain in that booth?
(Mr Taylor) They have to be built to even stricter
criteria than Dolby. Dolby criteria is NC25, the voice over booth
is NC20 or lower. The reason for that is to record a voice you
have to be able to catch every single nuance of that voice. A
voice recording is an acting of a script and what you are trying
to do in creating a commercial is create an illusion and that
illusion depends upon having no extraneous interference at all.
So in order for us to assemble that illusion we need elements
that are not contaminated with any sounds at all; we only want
the sounds that we want. The sound might be a train, to be quite
honest, but if it is not a train we do not want it!
5344. We take it that Crossrail will not be
needed for that! Tell us about the generality.
(Mr Taylor) So we record the voice, we record
the voice with huge precision. A voice recording starts with the
script and the script is on the right hand side of the actor there
and the picture is on the screen to the left. That booth is completely
isolated, as best as we can on a commercial basis, and bearing
in mind you can always go to another level this is a commercial
balance that we have set. We record the voice, the actor is rehearsed,
the actor is instructed by the recording engineer and the actor
is instructed by the director; the creative writers may be in
the recording studio itself; the creative writers may change and
edit the words in the script. You are trying to create an illusion
and any intrusion of unwanted sound into that illusion will completely
destroy the space you are trying to create in somebody's head
when they watch a commercial. Commercials are often viewed as
not having much creative skill, often viewed as not being very
difficult to do, and we would challenge that and say that our
belief is that commercials are the pinnacle of sound recording,
the pinnacle of editing and the pinnacle of production. In a film
you will have many, many minutes, if not hours, to create an illusion.
A commercial is a 60-second maximum attempt to grab you, tell
you about something and sell it to you, and that relies upon the
best in the world, and you can see that by numerous directors
who film editors who started in commercials—and there is
a long, long list of them—and it is the standard place where
you learn your skills. So we record the voice in that booth and
once the recording of the voice in the booth is done we use that
voice recording inside the main studio with all the other elements
to make the commercial soundtrack which we need.
5345. So we have the scene of the booth having
to be constructed in a way which creates a very hard arena for
the voice to be spoken. Can you just give the Committee any practical
examples of what sort of construction or lengths you go to in
order to ensure that objective?
(Mr Taylor) The booth is a complete room in
its own right, completely isolated. It floats on rubber. It has
walls approximately in those booths about 500 millimetres thick.
The actual construction is a massive amount of wood, a massive
amount of plasterboard, a massive amount of plywood. All the plywood
and plasterboard is cross-lapped so that there is no sound path
through. Every single joint is glued, Mastic'd. Inside our facility,
for example, in those six studios, there is approximately—and
it is a belief based on watching the lorries arrive—between
6000 to 7000 sheets of plasterboard, which is a huge quantity
of material to go into a very small building. When the rooms were
being designed we had to employ structural engineers because there
is so much weight in the voice over booth and in the main rooms
as well, so that we have to make sure that they are not going
to damage the structure of the building, and before we can sign
the lease we had to have a structural analysis to make sure that
the building could take the weight. All of that weight is in there
to give a very, very high level of sound isolation. The air conditioning
systems that feed the air in and out of the rooms have to have
specialised isolators on them; where they pass through the walls
they have to be on rubber joints so that there is no way the air
conditioning can transmit noise into the booth. We have to make
sure that there is no noise from the main room that can come via
the air conditioning into the booth. The light dimmers have to
be special dimmers that do not create any electrostatic noise
and also do not create any mechanical noise. If you dim down a
dimmer you often hear a little buzz and that would be completely
unacceptable for us. You will sometimes get a light bulb that
buzzes—I know that sounds very silly—and we would
have to change it because the engineer will hear it immediately.
The monitor that we use has to be made sure that that does not
buzz. You have to put the script up off the table so that it does
not rustle—that would be enough to ruin a voice recording.
5346. Is that why we see the script on a clipboard?
(Mr Taylor) Yes, that is why; absolutely. The
chair the person sits on has to be checked for squeaks, it will
not have castors. Before we try our chairs we actually sit in
them and we do this—and do they squeak, do they not squeak?
5347. Perhaps the shorthand writer can record,
"witness rotates in chair"!
(Mr Taylor) The table in front is specially
designed to be acoustically absorbing. The microphone is the most
expensive microphone you can buy, the Nouman U87—almost
the most expensive—and it is universally recognised as the
best microphone for recording a voice. To give you an idea of
the level that we go to we have the same microphones everywhere—we
do not use any other microphone for recording voice, that is the
only microphone that we will pass as being suitable for recording.
One, it gives us the highest possible standard but, two, it also
gives us absolute consistency because the voice over may come
in and may record a bunch of lines, they will go away and come
back in again and they have to use the same microphone. We will
try and put them in the same booth with the same engineer in the
same set-up, because even though all the booths are designed to
a very high standard they all sound slightly different—minutely
so. To give you an idea of how complex a voice recording session
can be we did one where we had the privilege of doing Julie Andrews.
Julie Andrews came to the UK, to come to the Palace to get her
dame-hood and she had a three-hour slot to record what we call
dialogue replacement for a commercial that she was doing in America.
The commercial had been shot in New York; a lot of the video graphic
replacement work was being done in the UK. It was the osteoporosis
charity commercial—because she just never does commercials—and
she came in and she had a three-hour slot in which she had to
replace 60 seconds or thereabouts, 60 seconds of talking to the
camera. It was engineered by my director of sound engineering,
Raja Sehgal, who is a very, very experienced engineer, world-class
engineer, and she did over 300-plus voice takes in a three-hour
period. What you are doing is you are taking the script, you are
looking at the lip movement, you are listening to the intonation
and the delivery, the character of the voices, and you are often
picking the right delivery there and the right delivery there
and you are stitching these all together to make it appears that
Julie Andrews is walking down a New York street and she is talking
to the camera, and the voice is perfect. The fact that there are
people walking past, cars going past, cabs going past, there is
wind noise, you are in an illusion and lost in that illusion.
The sound they shoot on location is used as a guide and it is
completely useless apart from as a guide. If you saw that with
the original sound transmitted you would not take it seriously;
you would not buy into the osteoporosis charity commercial which
she did for the society in America.
5348. Mr Binley: Mr Taylor, can I say
how much I admire your enthusiasm and we shall leave this place
with the sound of music in our ears! Can I thank you, Mr Newberry,
I think we have had a very good introduction and we have used
our time very usefully. I just remind you that the Committee will
stand adjourned until Tuesday 28 March at ten a.m.
60 Committee Ref: A63, Editing and Music Effects Studio
(WESTCC-9305-007). Back
61
Committee Ref: A63, Voiceover Booth (WESTCC-9305-006). Back
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