How WhereNext recorded and cataloged the natural history soundscape for the hit Netflix series.

The screaming piha is a grey feathered bird that has pretty average looks.

But it has a loud, and rhythmic call that evokes a sense of suspense, and has turned it into a Hollywood favorite.

Listen carefully, and you will find the screaming piha’s mating call blended into various movies that are set in tropical jungles.

Apocalypse Now uses recordings of the screaming piha as it transports viewers to the tense rainforest of Vietnam. And in 1492 you can hear the little bird scream, as Columbus and his crew tread carefully through the jungles of Hispaniola.

But there’s a problem here – the Screaming Piha only lives in the rainforests of South America.

Our agency helped Netflix avoid such embarrassing blunders as it made its widely acclaimed adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The series is set in Colombia’s Caribbean region, just like the famous and beloved novel it’s based on.

We traveled to that part of Colombia and recorded the natural sounds of more than 90 species of birds, amphibians, mammals, and insects, which were later included in the soundscape of the series.

“Having the correct ambient sound is extremely important for productions of this caliber,” WhereNext CEO Gregg Bleakney said. “Because sound gives your audience a deeper and more accurate connection with the place you’re showing. It helps to take you there.”

The natural history sounds collected by WhereNext gave the locations depicted in the series a more earthy feel that takes viewers back to 19th-century Colombia.

For example, the squawks of parrots in the fictional town of Macondo come from parrots in Colombia’s Caribbean region.

And when you see the series, you might even notice birds chirping in the courtyard of the Buendia Family or frogs croaking during night scenes that evoke life in rural Colombia.

Our agency got pulled into the magical world of One Hundred Years of Solitude at the beginning of last year when the series was in its post-production phase.

La Tina, the company in charge of sound post-production for the series, noticed that most of the scenes for One Hundred Years of Solitude were filmed in a set in central Colombia, which has birds, insects, and amphibians that are not quite the same as those of the Colombian Caribbean.

They contacted WhereNext to see what could be done to help the series sound more authentic.

“They reached out to us because we have a decade of experience in making nature documentaries,” like The Birders, a 2019 film on birdwatching routes in Colombia, said Sandra Eichmann, WhereNext’s General Manager.

Hundreds of bird species were filmed for that documentary ―which was part of a tourism promotion campaign for Colombia’s government.

To collect a new set of sounds for One Hundred Years of Solitude, WhereNext put together a team led by Eichmann and Diego Calderón, a biologist and bird specialist who has been researching Colombia’s bird life for over two decades.

Before heading out to the field, Calderón met with the audio post-production team to develop a list of birds that could be included in the soundscapes of One Hundred Years of Solitude and even brainstorm species whose songs could be used as background sounds for some of the characters.

“There is a gypsy called Melquiades who is always bringing new inventions into Macondo,” Calderón said. “So we wanted to accompany him with a futuristic or metallic sort of background sound, and we thought that something perfect for him would be the song of the Gulungo” a species of Oropendola, found on the Caribbean coast.

WhereNext’s team spent five days in Northern Colombia recording the sounds of more than 90 species of birds, five species of amphibians, two kinds of monkeys, and four types of insects.

Calderón said he had to be careful to find birds in places that were not disturbed by the sounds of motorcycles or radios, since those are noises that did not exist in 19th century Colombia, the period in which One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place.

It was an intense undertaking that could only be done in such a short time because of Calderón’s knowledge of local ecosystems, and his familiarity with birding routes in the north of Colombia.

Eichmann has also produced television series and natural history documentary films in the region, and deployed a network of local fixers for this project, who know the best places and the best times to find certain species of birds.

After the fieldwork was finished, WhereNext’s team made an audio library, with all the recordings gathered in the Caribbean region.

The tracks were delivered to the projects postproduction audio editors with information that would help them decide which scenes they would work best for, such as what altitudes different birds live at, what kind of environment they are likely to be found in, and whether a certain type of bird sings in the day or at night.

Eichmann said that WhereNext was able to take on this project, because it is an agency that has become accustomed to making stories that are “centered around nature.”

WhereNext recently made a series of videos for the World Wildlife Fund that feature the stories of  environmental leaders who are working to preserve natural habitats. 

And thanks to the success of The Birders, the agency also pioneered a YouTube series known as The Birders Show, that has filmed more than 60 episodes about birding locations in five different countries.

Bleakney said that the role of sound in films, should never be underestimated. And he warns that filmmakers should lay their hands off the screaming piha, unless they’re making stories set in South American rainforests.

“So much of the feeling you get as a traveller is not just visual, it’s the audio,” Bleakney said. “This project with One Hundred Years of Solitude was an opportunity for us to further promote Colombia to the world through our own hidden soundscape.”