Mr Flibble Talks To... Flibble-O-Phonic
The ever-intrepid penguin covers his ears and roams through the bowels of the BBC sound department in order to bring you an interview with the man who wants to make a T-Rex chirrup - Jem Whippey.

2 February, 2001

What kind of microphones are you using?

Mostly booms. The thing that most people are familiar with on a film shoot is a guy standing with a pair of headphones on and a great long rod with a microphone on the end - and that we call a fishing rod, funnily enough. In film they call them booms. But the thing I call a boom is a much bigger device, it's a big three-wheeled cart that you actually climb up a little ladder and get on, it's got a windy handle so it's got a longer reach - thirty odd foot - and you can get sound that you couldn't get the other way. Which is important because of the Take One thing.

And also when you're shooting in front of an audience you are multi-camera shooting. So you're not doing one shot and then setting up the next shot, and then editing together like film - you're shooting the whole scene in one go. If the director wants to cut from a wide shot at the beginning of a scene to close-up of one of the artists, that's continuous.

In the wide shot the boom can't be very near to the artist, but in the close-up the sound is supposed to sound closer - as well as the picture being closer, the sound has to sound closer. It's difficult to describe, but if you heard it wrong you'd go, 'Ooh, something's wrong with that.' There's ways of getting around that, but that's what rehearsal's all about - and of course there are lights all over the place when you shoot, and lights cast shadows. Boom shadows need to be cut around and rehearsed.

There are also radio mikes. When you really can't cover something on a boom, because of shadows or whatever, I might use radio mikes hidden in the costume or in the hair; or spot mikes, which are mikes just placed secretly around the set which I might fade up just for certain lines.

The trouble with those is they're not intelligent. Radio mikes rustle because they're near clothes, so they're not good in a dramatic setting because as soon as you hear any of that sort of thing, you're thrown, 'Oh, I'm watching a TV show.' You don't want that, you want people to get lost in the story and have a good time. So that's what booms do, they give you a much more natural sound. And then there are audience mikes as well - we want to hear them when they laugh.

Jem Whippey

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Right hand provided by Andrew Ellard