Do animals and birds and fish really make all those whoosh sounds like the BBC wildlife programmes overdub?
I know a couple of folk that work(ed) with natural history unit and companies they subcontract for footage. The answer to your question is almost always no. Particularly for things like fish and other marine animals that don’t use sound to communicate.
It’s also the case for virtually any type of movement, fighting, rustling through leaves etc that you see in land-based filming. You just can’t capture specific sounds from the distances you’re working with in most cases, unless the action will happen in a predictable place.
But I agree, it has gone too far, but this is editors’ faults, not sound crews – a lot of prime-time natural history productions are very dumbed-down and anthropomorphised or edited to tell a “story” – a real shame in my view, as it undermines the craft and artistry of the film crews.
Another thing I was told was the nasty side of filming kills, nest raids, offspring abandonment etc – e.g. we don’t see the 15 minutes of agonising death whilst a gazelle is being opened up via its bottom and having its guts pulled out and eaten while it watches.
