Music, Sound, and Audio Technology

Sound Coverage of Unique MGM Prom Wins RTS Craft and Design Award

By Staff
posted Nov 28, 2009, 09:21

Andy Payne and SIS LIVE's Sound Team win prestigious award for MGM Prom for BBC Classical Music Television.

(Langley, United Kingdom) Sound Supervisor Andy Payne and SIS LIVE's Sound Team won a Royal Television Society Craft and Design Award at the RTS annual awards ceremony on Monday night. Payne and his team won the Best Sound � Entertainment and Non Drama category for their work on the MGM Prom for BBC Classical Music Television for the BBC. SIS LIVE, Europe's largest outside broadcast (OB) and uplink supplier, provided the television coverage for the entire Proms 2009 season.

The RTS judges praised the SIS LIVE team for the award: "Year on year, the sound of this spectacle delights audiences around the world. This is a truly monumental achievement," they said.

Andy Payne, SIS LIVE Sound Supervisor, said: "The whole team is deeply honoured to win the RTS Craft and Design Award for the MGM Prom for BBC Classical Music Television. One of the best things about the RTS award is that it has got more value to craft people because it is being judged by craft people and it is good to be recognised by your peers."



The MGM Prom was one of the highlights of the Proms 2009 season, which celebrated the great film scores of the classic MGM film musicals. Film music specialist John Wilson painstakingly reconstructed the scores from films such as The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St Louis and Singin' in The Rain, and conducted a hand-picked orchestra of over 90 musicians in a unique event at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday 1st August. What made the music so unusual was that Wilson reconstructed the scores by writing the music out by ear from the soundtracks after the original scores were lost by the film studio in the 1960s.

The assembled orchestra was made up of three distinct elements: a symphony orchestra; a swingband horn section; and a small rhythm section. They were joined by five leading solo singers and 24 backing singers.

The MGM Prom was broadcast live on BBC Two and BBC HD channels. BBC HD carried full 5.1 surround sound, with BBC Two taking a simultaneous mix-down stereo version of the surround. BBC Radio 3 provided its own stereo balance for radio listeners. Because the orchestra was so large, the singers' voices had to be amplified in the hall, which made the sound recording even more complicated.

"The MGM Prom was particularly challenging because we had to record all the assembled musical elements, it was all done live and we had very little rehearsal time," Payne says. "There were a lot more microphones on the stage than we would normally have, to deal with the different sections of the orchestra, and the voices of the singers had to be amplified in the hall to balance them with the large forces of the orchestra. We worked very closely with John Wilson, our colleagues from Radio 3, the Royal Albert Hall team and BBC Classical Music Television to make sure everything went well on the night. Although we only had one afternoon in the hall to rehearse, there was an ecstatic response to the performance and after the broadcast the BBC was inundated with positive feedback."

SIS LIVE provided the television coverage for the entire BBC Proms season, which enjoyed a record-breaking season in 2009. The company supplied its Unit 2 production vehicle and MasterSound � its high-end audio mixing truck � alongside a further edit and deferral recording unit, plus its Link 13 vehicle to handle the outgoing circuits terrestrially via Crystal Palace to TV Centre.

Resources:

SIS LIVE: www.sislive.tv