Simian To Think About
Sound is a powerful device used to manipulate film and TV audiences. But when you’re shooting a documentary about great apes, surrounded by an army of cicadas, knee-deep in jungle mud, staying true to the source becomes a battle of ethics. We follow Craig Carter along this slippery path.
By Mark Davie
13 December 2013
If you’ve seen David Attenborough’s Wolves of the Sea and wondered who played the role of the killer whale, I can tell you now, it was Craig Carter. While the onscreen whale might have stolen the show, flopping about like a talentless prima donna, the one doing all the legwork was Carter. He spent days splashing about in a pool — playing the audio equivalent of Andy Serkis to Gollum — to breathe life into the whale’s performance. Such is the life of a sound designer.
PICKING YOUR BATTLES
Craig Carter is a man constantly contemplating whether his ethics are sound. His job demands it. In 2012 he wrapped work on the biopic tele-drama, Underground: The Julian Assange Story, about the young Aussie hacker who turned into the world’s informant. But before he accepted the role of Sound Designer, he did his research. Filling up the coffers is one thing, but when you’re taking part in dramatising the life of a controversial man, you want to know where you stand.
Craig Carter: “I am fascinated by the whole dilemma with Julian Assange and the fact that he’s taken it upon himself to reveal things that he has. It’s arguable both ways about whether he has the right to do that. But on the other hand, we live in a society where information is very channelled to us, so we’ve got our own form of propaganda. I think there always has to be another way of gaining knowledge. I think more and more people form opinions on things without really trying to find out anything about it. And they’re very likely to accept the first glossy report or the opinion that appears to be the most informed.”
It’s a conundrum for Carter, who knows only too well the power of sound in manipulating an audience. Even in drama, where flogging a cabbage can be mistaken for a punch to the head, you have to pick your battles.
Craig Carter: “Clearly music can turn somebody from a villain into a hero just by the type of music that you use. If the film is taking a certain line, you make an ethical decision at the beginning about whether you want to be involved in supporting that or not. I don’t think as a sound designer or as a composer you have that autonomy or independence to form your own opinion within the film, you’re either with it or you aren’t.”
You watch a caterpillar going up a leaf in a BBC doco and you can hear its feet! That’s just foley, it’s somebody making that sound
NO APING ABOUT
Most recently, Carter left the dramatic world for the jungle. Spending 10 weeks in Africa, and five in Indonesia recording sound for a film about six species of great apes and their diminishing habitat. Ethically, it was more of a no-brainer on this project, with the intent being a balanced approach with more focus on asking the questions than finger-pointing.
Craig Carter: “The six species we were studying — bonobos, chimpanzees, orang-utans, and eastern, western and mountain gorillas — are all threatened by different things. In the Congo, where we were filming the bonobos and gorillas, it’s mainly about hunting and Bushmen. They’re inextricably bound up with the population pressure. You’re dealing with people that can’t get enough food that would previously have been quite legitimately hunting apes in the jungle — but the number of apes is so down.
“With orang-utans in places like Sumatra and Borneo it’s mainly about palm oil plantations bringing huge deforestation and loss of habitat. And it’s all very well to be grand about this stuff, but the pressure is coming from here. They only grow this stuff because they can sell it and they’re poor. Let’s be honest, you couldn’t look at your child dying of starvation and then have some noble opinion overriding that saying, ‘We must preserve this.’ The only way forward is having the people themselves see those primates as a resource as opposed to a source of food. The climatologists and experts we worked with really suggest that’s it got to be less of a pressure, or they need to be sponsored to not do it. You can’t just take away an income, you’ve got to replace it with something.
“If we progress at the same rate it’s very likely there mightn’t be any orang-utans in the wild in about 20 years — they’ll all be in zoos or sanctuaries. But the film was more about the people that work with them and what’s destroying habitat so there’s a bit of a message there too.”
WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU
Carter lost eight kilos, just in the Congo. Entering the habitat of some of the mountain gorillas required hiking to Buranga near the northern border of Rwanda, at an elevation of 6000 feet. And to get to Mundeka, they had to hike through about 10km of swamp. Thankfully he had guides to help carry his gear. Carter: “I was told that if you turn around and they’re not there or they drop their stuff and run, that’s what you do too. If you surprise elephants, they can get quite nasty and essentially they want to kill you.
A big part of Carter’s job is gathering environmental sounds, which usually means wandering off alone, out of earshot and generator noises. But as one German scientist warned him, ‘You can’t simply go out there. It will kill you.’ “All camps run generators so you are a bit restricted,” said Carter. “It wasn’t the sort of Eden I thought it might have been to go and record in.”
But proximity to sounds wasn’t always an issue. Carter: “I had great privilege because when you’re near these animals — I sound like I’m being a bit ’70s here — it is a bit life-changing. We’re supposed to keep at least seven metres away because of their health, and you wear masks. But if they break the lines, the rules are off. I’ve had a female gorilla walk past and touch me on the back. They don’t realise what they can do to you either, they’re pretty gentle. I never felt intimidated around gorillas, though with the chimpanzees I did. They’re more like us. They’re incredibly volatile. Orang-utans are probably my favourite. They’re like philosophers and they’re all fairly different.”
THE RULES
Whether the subject matter is more or less controversial than a worldwide whistleblower, the ethical dilemmas of sound replacement and augmentation start to mount up in documentary shooting. Often, the environment won’t let you record a single clean sound, even when a female gorilla sits behind you munching, there’s likely thousands of cicadas clamouring for airtime on the same take. So what’s a sound designer to do?
Craig Carter: “My job was to record them vocally, but you’re dealing with a whole lot of ambient noise, cicadas, insects, wind and anything else that’s there — they’re not quiet locations. And then I’d record ambience. But I was really gathering building blocks. I’m sound designing and cutting the soundtrack for it too, so that becomes my source material to rebuild the film.
“A lot of this will be refitting, grabbing behavioural sounds and working out where you can use them to match up. A lot of natural history films you watch, on the BBC for example, that sound’s not actually happening at the time it’s been shot, it’s refitted later. I did a film on killer whales once called Wolves of the Sea with David Attenborough. It was shot mute. Just say you’ve got a sea lion that’s giving birth, they’d try and record one and then I’d have to try and fit that to its actions. I’m essentially the whale in that film. I spent a long time in the pool being recorded watching the image and making noises and splashes. Because if you go down to a surf beach and try and record a splash it will just be white noise. Whereas you want a defined moment.
“The sounds are processed, changed or added to — like in any drama. It’s not unusual for me or for anybody to build up a sound with a whole lot of foreign sounds. Just say I was knocking something off the table, I might add explosions to give it frequency, to give it a push. But they’re disguised within the main sound. So I might be adding low frequency to what might be a very mid range sound. Then that one event is manipulated to wherever it’s meant to be in the room and what level is has to be played dramatically.
“There are a few tiny rules. Like we tend not to move dialogue around much because it gets pretty distracting, so it stays in the middle. But things like crowds move around you.
“What really interests me is working with sound that creates a mood, just like music does. Just say you and I are having a huge argument on the side of a highway somewhere. I might not want to hear anything but what you’re saying. So to me those cars are completely unimportant. Or it could be I was confused or distressed and I can’t hear a word you’re saying and all I can hear is the traffic.
“That’s a very basic example, but how sound is manipulated is about what it is doing in terms of the storyline and the emotion. Music is trying to tell you what to feel a lot of the time or to signal something like danger — with high frequency. The more interesting films use those tools well — sounds are crafted like a very basic form of music.”
PRIMATE INSTINCTS
Mark Davie: Massaging things in post is obviously a big part of sound design, but how do you capture the best results in the field?
Craig Carter: It’s all about mic placement when you’re on location. It’s more about what a mic is excluding rather than what you’re recording. But you don’t want to back yourself into a corner where you get a signal that you can’t do anything with. It just requires that you be dedicated to try and always be thinking about extraneous noises.
You have to rely on headphones and assume that’s what your recorder is hearing. If you’re recording really loud sounds where you can’t tell if what you’re hearing is inside or outside the cans, then you’ve got to look at it dynamically on the recorder and just see if you’re getting a proper signal.
Mark Davie: What were the main sounds you were chasing
in the jungle?
Craig Carter: I just hope that I can get enough of those calls to clean the actual vocal away from the sounds that I don’t want. I want to be able to manipulate that sound, and I’ll probably enhance it or add things. Not to falsify it but to try and give it body. I got really close, with orang-utans I would have got close enough to touch them. But they don’t vocalise a lot. So a lot of those movements will get made afterwards out of sounds that were there, or I’ll foley it, because you don’t have control over signal-to-noise. Say I’m getting really good movement, like it’s eating, but there are shitloads of cicadas all the way through it. You can’t use it because that sound is piercing, in both mid and high range. It’s a gathering process.
Mark Davie: What would you do to enhance it?
Craig Carter: I would create a copy and harmonise it. If it’s a barking sound I might add some abrasive noise to one edge of the bark. By the time you clean up the recorded sound, it might be all soft and diffuse. Like a soft guitar chord, it’s almost like adding a plectrum or string noise to it to give it a real edge.
Then I might look for something to create a bit of body that’s not just mid frequency, and harmonise and add a bit of a rumble to it. So I’m giving these animals a presence. It takes a while to do, it’s a lot like creating a library.
Mark Davie: Do you just set a process for a particular sound and replicate that?
Craig Carter: Not with the same call, they’re like footsteps. If you recorded two footsteps and alternated them as you walk across the room, you would sound like a cartoon. Every sound has a different shape. So within reason you create enough of a library that you can use. Sometimes you might even copy things like breathing sounds, because by that stage you know enough about the sound to get vocally close to it yourself. It’s not something you’d go to first, but I might add it occasionally. Because this is a doco I probably won’t go there, but if it was a drama I would. That said, you watch a caterpillar going up a leaf in a BBC doco and you can hear its feet! That’s just foley, it’s somebody making that sound.
Mark Davie: So it goes back to that question of ethics.
Craig Carter: There’s a certain amount of licence you can take. Who cares if I use the water sound from that splash or another one really? But I wouldn’t try and approximate vocalisations of animals — you probably couldn’t anyway. You would keep environmental sounds honest, but geographic sounds like somebody moving a rock or walking, they’re just sounds and they’re not terribly important. But you know, an albatross takes off into the sky and they put some beautiful piano piece to it. I’m pretty sure the bird doesn’t hear that and think, ‘Oh wow, a little arpeggio.’
RESPONSES