Select Committee on Crossrail Bill Minutes of Evidence


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Nike for example, and we did not have a Dolby licence, or they found that our licence was invalid or had lapsed or been rescinded then we would be in the position of having to put out a commercial, Dolby would refuse to do the transfers—which is what would happen—and then Nike would miss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


 
previous page contents

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2007
Prepared 14 November 2007