Tinseltown: Home of the Chatter Clatter

This post is not a joke

A couple days ago a friend of mine made a post about the advantages of using bird chatter over music in films. I thought there were some excellent points brought up, especially regarding the financial and legal costs that are involved in using music in a film. It seems like the advantages of using bird chatter completely outweigh that of using music. So this got me thinking, how come more people don't take this route? Well it turns out that there is a lot more that goes into using bird chatter than some would like to think.

I stumbled across an article a couple of days ago that talked about Hollywood's bad rap when it comes to using bird chatter, and it turns out that a lot of birders are disappointed with Hollywood's effort to use bird chatter properly.

Let me give an example: Lets say you are an avid birdwatcher. You love to explore wooded areas in search for birds, not only to watch them, but to hear them as well. So imagine you are watching a movie  about some murder case that happened in a small town in Minnesota. You are completely sucked in, almost as if you are in the movie yourself. But then out of nowhere while the protagonist detective is examining a body left in the woods, you hear the chatter of a California Towhee, a bird indigenous only to California and parts of Oregon.

To a hardcore birdwatcher, this would instantly ruin the mood for them. It would be almost as bad as seeing a boom mic enter the frame.

Kenn Kaufman

“In my experience, inaccuracy is the norm,” says bird guide author and Audubon magazine field editor Kenn Kaufman. “It’s typical and expected for films to have the wrong bird sounds in the background. Which is sort of bizarre when you consider how much birdsong lends to a sense of place. Even if you don’t know what the birds are, you still might associate the sounds with the place if you’ve been there.”

I find this funny because Hollywood spends millions of dollars to try and create realistic atmospheres and to avoid any continuity issues, and then they just brush over the tiny details like bird chatter thinking that no one will realize.

David Sibley, the author and illustrator of The Sibley Guide to Birds, a person that Tom and I personally reached out to for help, commented in this issue.

David Allen Sibley

Sibley: “One of my personal favorites is in one of the Indiana Jones movies. The opening scene in a steamy tropical jungle includes the sound of a displaying male Willow Ptarmigan [a bird of the Arctic tundra]. Another, like many other examples, was a movie set in the Colorado Rockies in winter that included Alder Flycatcher and Mourning Warbler singing, both extremely rare in Colorado at any season, absent from the US in winter, and I think the scene had them singing at night!”

It's apparent that Hollywood's mistakes haven't gone unnoticed and I think it is a great opportunity to learn from their mistakes and make sure to put the proper bird noises in our film.

The Advantages of Using Bird Chatter Instead of Musical Soundtracks in Movies

Hollywood producers are always looking to find new, innovative ways to create a hit movie. Some movie producers have gone as far as putting talking dogs into their films to try to make them successful, but many overlook the power of music.

One technique that a lot of Hollywood producers haven't tried yet is to use bird calls as the soundtrack of their movie.

There are many advantages to replacing the soundtrack of your movie with bird calls, but this short essay will detail a few of the most obvious ones:

Financial

According to David Bell, author of "Getting The Best Score For Your Film," a high budget feature film can cost up to $400,000 plus a $200,000 to $400,000 composer fee. That is an awful lot of money to spend on music.

When your movie is about a haunted house for example, it would make a lot of sense to invest money into bone-chilling and spooky music because that can play a big role in giving the audience they haunt they paid for, but for movies where music is less important, it might be smart to consider using bird calls to fill the dead air.

When dealing with a medium-budget film, you could decide to use bird calls instead of music and re-allocate your funds to another part of the production because you don't need to pay a bird for the music they produce.

Legal

Under U.S. law, in order to use a song in a movie you must acquire a Synchronization License from the publisher to use the song in synchronization with the video and a Master Use License from the record label to reproduce the song in your film.

The advantage of using bird chatter in your film instead of music is that you can circumvent the acquisition of these music licenses because birds won't sue you unless a human lawyer is representing them.

The chances of a human lawyer representing a bird in court are extremely low and there have been no known cases in the history of film of somebody being sued for using bird calls instead of music.

Nostalgia

Other than scent, which is known to be the human sense most strongly linked with nostalgia, hearing might be the next. In terms of hearing, here is nothing more nostalgic than hearing a bird you remember from your childhood. That memory can be very therapeutic for people and very enjoyable for others. These emotions can add to the overall enjoyment of a film.


All in all, replacing your soundtrack with bird chatter should not be overlooked by mainstream Hollywood.