Tricks of the Time Team sound crew

Time Team sound technicians are connected to the digital tape held in the film camera by a cable. They then carry what amounts to a small audio mixing desk in a special pouch on their chest. This is a receiver for the special radio microphones that the members of Time Team wear, and can also handle a direct feed from a boom-arm microphone.

'Each person who is going to speak has a radio mike that transmits on a certain frequency,' says sound man Pete Fisher, who works regularly with Time Team. 'I receive the signal from each microphone and mix the sound as we record. As there are often three crews on Time Team we all use different frequencies, so that we only pick up the sounds from what our particular crew is filming. You have to watch what is being filmed very closely as some people either scratch their clothes against the mike or speak a lot louder than the others. I can raise or lower the levels live as we record.'

The sound technicians also use microphones mounted on boom arms to pick up ambient sound. 'The boom mike can fill in a lot of sound space,' Pete continues. 'Sometimes we rig mikes in the trees and just record continual ambient sound. This is called a wild track. We may end up with an hour of crows and diggers scraping and this can be very useful for pasting over any joins during editing and post production.'