In 2016 Planet Earth II won the British Film and Television Arts Award for “Best Sound Factual.” This despite none of its sound being factual. For each episode, the picture editors handed over an hour-long locked cut and a blank Pro Tools session, leaving sound designers to “recreate something that sounds like it would in the wild—a soundtrack that is true to nature.”
The “truth” of the sound track corresponds not, like the image track, to an “objective reality,” but rather to a secondary representation of it, a rendering so haptic, so tactile, so sensorial that, in the words of film-sound historian John Belton, it “push[es] beyond the realism of the outside world and into an inner, psychological realism.”