Straight from the Horse's Mouth: Collecting Equine Voices for Film
by Annabel Burn
Today, a teeny bit of Hollywood glamour came to our humble little yard in Epsom, Surrey. Our horses were recorded going about their daily lives to provide film sound effects for a new Universal Studios production coming out later this year.
Three of our horses, Flynn, Max and Melly, were mic'd up with super sensitive devices gaffer taped onto their fly masks, so the unique sounds of each individual horse could be collected. Melly is a particularly chatty horse with a huge range of different expressive noises, but Flynn and Max are quieter so we had to do some work to get whinnies, nickers and snorts from them.
A few mics were placed around the yard for catching general yard atmosphere, and there was a mobile mic for honing in on any interesting ad hoc pony sounds. This looked like a giant hairy hamster on the end of a long pole, so if you watch the film and you hear a surprised sounding snort or two, you'll know why!
A totally different day, we're really excited for the release of this major motion picture and will be able to reveal more detail and behind the scenes content on it's release later this year.
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