More Than Just Games, Sports TV Shows - Fiction and Documentaries - Rely on Authentic Audio From Welcome to Wrexham to Winning Time, sound teams balance authenticity and cinematic By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Monday, October 23, 2023 - 11:00 am
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A look at channel listings these days suggests that there are almost as many fictional and documentary sports productions as actual broadcast and streamed games and events. Examples range from comedies like the occasionally harsh IRL of Welcome to Wrexham and the optimistic comedy of Ted Lasso to Netflix's Formula 1 opus Drive To Survive and HBO's Succession-like Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.
Sports have long been a fascination for Hollywood, from 1942's melodramatic Pride of the Yankees to the grandaddy of primetime network sports series, Friday Night Lights. And both fiction and non-fiction productions have seen increases lately: Full Swing, which debuted this year and tracks top golfers through a season, was followed by a behind-the-scenes TV series on the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the Tour de France, and the Invictus Games. Sitcoms and dramas are also well-represented, with such titles as Glow, Necessary Roughness, The League, The White Shadow, and Ballers.
And all this content is increasingly marked by the same thing: both fictional and real-life portrayals of sports share broadcast's emphasis on the audio.
We might be able to enhance some of the sounds of a game on the show, such as the impact of a kick of a ball sounding like a cannon shot in a slo-mo scene, says Jon Schell, sound effects editor on Welcome to Wrexham and three-time Prime-Time and Sports Emmy Award nominee for shows including The Playbook and Wrexham. The sound of sports on television is already pretty cinematic, with microphones on the athletes and on places like the rim of the [NBA] basket. They do seem to be working off each other. We can play with [processing] like reverbs, but, like the people who mix the actual games, we do everything with the intent of telling the story.
Welcome to Wrexham audio mixer Mark Jensen: If you heard every ball catch, if you heard every tackle, if you heard every footstep, [it would be] bizarre. It just sounds fake.
Wrexham, which runs on FX and streams on Hulu, has a lot of audio, much of it ambient sound that creates the backdrop for neighborhood shots and sets the tone for the narratives. But the sports-effects audio strives to be authentic. According to Schell, a local sound crew captured the crowd sounds from three games at the Racecourse Ground, Wrexham AFC's home, ahead of the show's last season, giving him and audio mixer Mark Jensen a lot with which to fill the 5.1 surround field the show is mixed in.
(Hulu automatically streams in 2.0 stereo; however, some devices can also play certain live content and on-demand titles in HD 5.1 surround. Badges during live playback or on the title's Details page identify when 5.1 is available.)
The Crowd Is an Essential Element Crowd sounds, recorded in discrete four-channel audio - two mics pointing left and right forward-facing, two pointing left and right but rear-facing synced on four discrete audio tracks, assigned LF-RF/LS-RS in the final mix - have given mixer Jensen a lot to work with. It was an audio element that was lacking in Wrexham's first season, he says, but has been a star of the show's second.
The crowd and all the songs they sing and the energy they bring is an aspect that no other show has, he explains. The songs that they sing are very specific, and there are songs for every player, and when [a particular] player scores a goal, they sing a specific song. It's amazing, and I was, like, we have to get this! So they recorded eight hours' worth of crowd audio for us. If you watch Season 2, keep your ears peeled because there's going to be moments when you're, like, Wow, I feel like I am in this stadium. Audio-wise, it's mind-blowing.
What You're Not Hearing Although fictional and documentarian representations of sports might accentuate certain sounds of games, Jensen, an Emmy Award nominee who mixed audio for football-coach documentary The Playbook, says it's also important to recognize what viewers don't hear.
If you heard every ball catch, if you heard every tackle, if you heard every footstep, he says, you'd be, like, this is bizarre. It just sounds fake, and, for me and, I think, for a lot of viewers, it would be a big turnoff.
In fact, he adds, he has heard sports productions resort to sonic clich s, such as using the same impact sounds on every tackle, not unlike a sports version of the famous Wilhelm Scream, heard in thousands of movies since it was first recorded in 1951.
At times, he says, I have to push back and say, Guys, look, this shot of this tackle is taken from the camera that was up in the stands, like 200 yards from that tackle; you're just not going to hear anything from that. Perspective has to inform how I mix and what you're going to hear. So I have to pull all that back and replace all the [clich ] tackles with my own tackles, which we now have lots of that we can throw in. Even then, it's very light. You want it detailed but not hitting me over the head. It's a tricky balance.
The Ted Lasso Perspective Apple TV's Ted Lasso comes at sports as a situation dramedy. So sound designer/sound effects editor Kip Smedley has a bit more flexibility in representing the sound of English football when the show's eponymous character tries to use his naturally sunny disposition to overcome the inexperience he was surreptitiously hired for to enable the owner's revenge against an ex-husband and, in spite of that, builds a winning team.
Ted Lasso sound designer Kip Smedley: [With] a
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More Than Just Games, Sports TV Shows - Fiction and Documentaries - Rely on Authentic Audio From Welcome to Wrexham to Winning Time, sound teams balance authenticity and cinematic By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
