March 06, 2015

Poldark pulls off romance and intrigue on a grand scale

Technicolor creative services, London provided full colour and sound post for this successful adaptation of Winston Graham's novels.

 

A costume-drama, it is set in the beautiful, wild landscapes of Cornwall and follows the story of Ross Poldark, played by Aiden Turner.  Upon his return home from the American Revolution Poldark discovers that all has changed. We follow him navigating intense conflicts between land owning families and the proletariat, and internally around a romance between himself and the woman engaged to his cousin.

Gareth Bull, Head of Sound, gave us the insight into working on Poldark:

‘From the outset, we knew that Poldark required a rich and vibrant mix. Having the beautiful wide landscapes of Cornwall juxtapose the claustrophobic interior mine scenes gave us the perfect opportunity to enhance the environments and create different moods using our soundscape.

Poldark has a wonderfully written script, and we were aware throughout the mix of the necessity to understand every word of the story. We worked hard to ensure intelligibility was prioritised throughout, whilst the depth and detail of our atmosphere and sound FX were maintained.

The beautiful sequences shot by the Cornwall coast came presented specific obstacles for sound. The cliff tops were prone to heavy winds, and the location microphones could also pick up the sea wash. Where possible we used noise reduction software to recover the original audio, however in some cases the actors come into our Lexington Street ADR theatre to revisit the scenes and record replacement audio.’