Survey - The Unbelievable Glory of the Human Voice

On Making The Unbelievable Glory of the Human Voice

By Tony Williams 17/04/2015

Julian Waring, a friend, was passionate about singing. We collaborated to make The Unbelievable Glory of the Human Voice. Julian Wrote and presented the film. For the ‘If I Loved You’ song we got together as many singers as we could find to sing the song in their own style, then cut them all together.

We reproduced Dame Florence Foster Jenkin’s famous debut: a woman who couldn’t sing but nevertheless hired Carnegie Hall in New York and sung to an astonished audience. Michael Heath played both Dame Florence and the pianist, miming to an actual recording of the event.

The end montage took weeks to pull off. We started with a soundtrack which we built from rock music of the day, then timed frame by frame using thousands of still photographs, and shot the four minute sequence to the timed shooting script. It was a nervous moment when we viewed the four minutes rushes!