How sounds are made for nature documentaries

• Many of the sounds you might hear in nature documentaries are not actually the real ones recorded in the wild.
• Foley artist Richard Hinton has helped create sounds for the likes of “Planet Earth II” and “Our Planet” to help captivate the audience.
• He often makes sounds for natural things that don’t have an associated sound, such as a spider’s web, sprouting plants, or even the northern lights.
• Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Following is a transcript of the video:

[cymbals softly ringing]

Narrator: Ah, the northern lights. Beautiful to see…and hear?

[wind chimes gently ringing]

The thing is, the northern lights don’t actually make a sound. Yet when you watch this clip, you don’t think twice about it. In fact, if you start to really look, and listen, closely to everything from “Planet Earth” to “Our Planet,” you’ll notice sounds that would either be impossible to capture…

[Slinky shaking]

or ones that are straight-up made up.

[leather squishing]

Nature documentaries are full of unnatural sounds, and they’re created in postproduction by someone like Richard Hinton, whose job as a nature doc Foley artist is a study in the subtle art of exaggeration. So, why even create sounds for nature docs?

[lips smacking]

Well, shooting in the wild makes it almost impossible to capture real sound. Take this aerial shot of a dolphin pod in “Our Planet.” It was filmed high up in the air by a drone, so while the dolphins are splashing up and down, all the camera picks up are loud blades. Nature docs also frequently utilize macro lenses, meaning they might actually be shooting a subject matter that’s across a valley, or they’ll capture objects normally too small to have a registered noise to it. That means that sometimes Richard and his team at Films at 59 will actually have to fake sounds to give life to it.

Richard Hinton: You can fill a television screen with a shot of a spider walking across a web, and there’s no sound there, obviously, and that can feel a bit strange, or there’s a hole in the story.

[magnetic tape rustling]

Narrator: For “The Hunt,” he needed to get the sound of a spider shooting a web.

Hinton: I really like doing stuff like this, because I get carte blanche to be a little creative. Because there’s no perceivable sound in nature, it means I can kind of make something up.

Narrator: But while he can make something up, he still needs to match the sound he’s watching on screen. For the web, he needed something really stretchy, so he grabbed a Slinky and stretched it out as far as possible.

[Slinky rattling]

Hinton: You get that wonderful cable under tension.

Narrator: Now, it sounded good when he just stretched it out between his hands, like you see here, but because the camera was so close, he needed a really close sound. So he applied proximity effect, where the Foley artist will make a sound as close to the mic as possible. It’s actually a risky move.

Hinton: The microphone is almost feeding back on itself because you’re too close to the mic or you’re overloading the mic.

Narrator: But he found the winning noise only by shoving the Slinky right on top of the mic.

Hinton: That proximity just pulls you in really tight to the action and what’s going on on the screen, and it just makes it sound more unworldly.

Narrator: He didn’t just need the web blast. He also had to capture a spider’s tiny footsteps, yet another thing in nature that normally wouldn’t have a sound, at least that humans could hear. He needed something more delicate than most animal footsteps. He started playing with a bunch of magnetic audio tape, a classic Foley technique that can cover many types of sounds.

Hinton: You could use this, but it sounds too clumpy. It’s not delicate enough. It’s not precise enough. If I wrap it around the reel, I can use the reel as a sounding board.

[magnetic tape rustling]

And you can get individual footsteps.

Narrator: Close-ups also mean he will need to exaggerate parts of a larger animal you wouldn’t normally hear a sound from. For example, when working on Disney’s “Bears,” Richard needed to capture the sound of a bear opening its eye and blinking. Because a bear is covered in fur, he first rubbed a piece of fur to capture the lid opening.

[fur rustling]

But Richard actually needed to create two sounds, as he observed that moisture forms when one opens their eyes. For a wetter sound, he relied on his own mouth.

[mouth salivating] It’s when these two sounds are mixed together that you really hear the lid opening.

[fur rustling] [mouth salivating]

The up-close-and-personal presentation of nature docs is what brings Richard to create some of the most innovative noises. Thanks to amazing HD cameras, time-lapse technology has changed what a nature doc can capture, and we can now witness the entire cycle of a plant growing.

Hinton: The beauty, from my point of view as a Foley artist, because it is such a stylized shot, I don’t have to think too carefully about being true to nature. It gives me a certain level of creative freedom.

Narrator: Like with the spider web, Richard needed a stretchy sound for this shot from “Planet Earth II,” where mushrooms and other fungi spring from the ground. But he wanted a sound more organic than a Slinky.

He first went for a mushy effect with a wet newspaper, but he needed more control.

[newspaper squishing]

Through this trial and error, he found leather strips and scuba gear were the only things both stretchy and controllable enough.

[strips stretching]

To add a little sweetener, Richard played around with a wet leather shammy.

[shammy squishing]

Hinton: And this is a particularly useful lad too if you’re showing the decay of the fungus as well as the growth, because usually they kind of melt into a sticky, kind of wet, moist, oozy kind of substance.

[shammy squishing] [strips stretching]

Narrator: Now, there are certain things in nature docs that you wouldn’t hear even if you got up close to it, because they are simply a visual phenomenon, like the northern lights we mentioned earlier.

[cymbals softly ringing]

For some animal movements there is a real sound, but it’s not very pleasant to listen to, so he needs to create something better, like he did for these underwater shots in “Our Planet.”

Hinton: You don’t really hear much sound underwater. Although sound travels very well, it’s very

[hisses and crackles]

It would become very tiresome to listen to after about two minutes. Your ears would get really tired, and you’d probably turn it off. So we embellish a little bit.

Narrator: Unsurprisingly, he uses real water, but it’s how his hands interact with the water that makes the difference.

Hinton: The smaller the animal, the more delicate you can be. Narrator: When it gets to more medium-size fish, like this large shoal of mackerel in “Our Planet,” he’ll also dump that clump of magnetic tape into the tank for an extra layer of sound. [water splashing]

Hinton: What you can do is you can focus on the moving shoal and really focus on those tight turns and those sharp movements.

[water splashing]

Narrator: If there’s more than one type of aquatic animal in the shot, Richard will differentiate by doing one take with the magnetic tape and one without.

[water splashing]

For something larger, like a whale, seen in this shot, he’ll both make his movements larger and go deeper into the water. [water intensely splashing]

There is always extra editing that goes on after Richard is done recording. Richard will later apply an EQ, which filters out harsher frequency and adds depth, making it at least feel like it is really recorded under the ocean.

Listen to this before… [water crisply splashing] and after. [muffled water splashing]

Lava makes a surprisingly soft sound, and when Richard had to exaggerate it for this scene in “Planet Earth II,” he wanted it to have more impact.

Hinton: You kind of hear the interaction of what it’s setting fire to more than the sound of the lava creeping.

Narrator: Now, just the fire crackling doesn’t give much of a sense of the massive scale of a lava flow. He needed a low-end rumble. He uses smaller rocks when making glaciers to capture the debris but went for a much larger one here.

Hinton: For this, I put some gloves on because there’s a real danger of losing a fingernail. [boulder rumbling] It’s a very bass-y sound.

Narrator: While Richard has a lot of freedom on nature shows and movies, there’s one area he really can’t embellish or exaggerate.

Hinton: There’s a lot of science around animal vocalizations these days. There’s a whole range of alarm calls and distress calls and greeting calls, so we rely very heavily on accurate library recordings to make sure that we’re getting it correct.

Narrator: But Richard will be brought in for the vocals you might not think about, such as eating, breathing, or panting. For “Our Planet,” Richard was asked to make a very specific lip-smacking sound from an orangutan, as the actual footage contained crew members talking in the background.

[lips smacking]

Hinton: And it gets quite painful if you’re doing that for five minutes, but, you know, Foley is a contact sport, and we suffer for our art.

[water bubbling]

Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.