Friday, February 22nd, 2008
I was watching an interesting documentary the other day that had obviously spent most of its budget on traveling around the US and Europe in pursuit of interviews. They captured a fascinating depth and breadth about the subject by literally going the extra mile. While there wouldn’t be much of a film without this footage, the dialogue tracks sounded ‘choppy’ and low-budget. As a sound engineer it struck me how easy it is to overlook simple, relatively cheap post-production sound techniques that can dress up hard-won interviews into dialogue tracks that sound natural and continuous.
When the filmmakers got back to the editing room with these interviewee’s stories, naturally to avoid jump cuts they go to B-roll whenever they want to interrupt an interviewee to cut the story shorter. This helps cut out the fluff, shorten the interview, and hopefully help it flow. The astute viewer will see this happening during cuts to fidgeting hands or a shot of them walking around earlier in the day, or a sudden shot of the surroundings. The trick is to keep these cuts smooth so as to make the soundtrack appear like it is one continuous, natural speaking event. The trouble, however, is finding a natural place to cut someone off and then blend unrelated sentences together that could be minutes apart - and much different in tone quality.
Enter dialogue editorial. Once the director & editor have decided on how the interview should be cut, sewing up the disparate speaking levels and abstract sentence rhythms into something that flows is the job of the dialogue editor. Most will probably tell you that their primary tools are level adjustments and room tone.
Techniques like levels adjustments and audio crossfades are self-explanatory and par for the course: the idea is to get the perceived volume of the beginning and endings of phrases to flow smoothly in a natural way. If the interviewee got closer to the mic during a sentence, the sound engineer rides the level to keep it consistent. Et cetera, ad infinitum.
Proper use of room tone, however, seems like an obscure art when building a smooth interview track, but it is actually not hard to learn. When all that editing and cutting to B-roll results in gaps between phrases, the dialogue editor inserts a length of clean, natural background ambience between phrases and crossfades it into the two existing clips before and after it. Linearly, on a timeline, this looks like: |PHRASE 1|–x–|ROOM TONE SEGMENT|–x–|PHRASE 2| where the –x–’s are crossfades between clips. With good clean room tone (which should always be recorded on location) the audience will never know that a natural-sounding 4-minute interview was actually born from 6 hours of footage.
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Saturday, February 9th, 2008
ADR is shorthand for automatic dialogue replacement - though hardly automatic and nothing more than a necessary evil to many directors, actors and post-production audio engineers. While it can be rather routine to coordinate and carry out these recording sessions, ADR should really be thought of as another creative tool in the sonic arsenal. Not just for flubbed lines anymore, ADR can marry dialogue with picture in some interesting ways that would otherwise be clumsy or inconceivable to shoot live.
ADR usually has an actor re-reading her lines to rough picture in the studio, and speaking them pretty much as performed on set. Reasons for doing so include: noise & interference (e.g. airplane passing overhead), equipment malfunction (such as the actor’s throat or mouth), or the director may want a different inflection, emphasis, or tone quality out of the lines. It’s basic cut-and-paste, but let’s first talk about a variation on the theme before we get into the more creative ways it can be used.
When an actor flubs a line but carries on in character, there are several ways to save the scene. One way is to interrupt the shot with a crosscut to a reaction shot of the listening character. Actor #1’s dialogue continues underneath the cutaway. Since the audience does not see the actor’s mouth move during the crosscut, it’s just a matter of dubbing in the correct line in post over the visual of the listening character (or other cutaway, say of nervous hands, tapping feet, or wind in the trees). It’s possible that this method might be problematic if the cutaway takes the viewer out of an intense emotional moment or if it interrupts comedic timing or editing rhythm. In those cases, another solution to botched lines must be found. Otherwise, cutting away to avoid trouble spots in the dialogue can be your saviour. In fact, it’s second nature to documentary editors who generally have only one take of an interviewee’s lines with which to work anyway.
So what about using this technique on purpose to enhance the story? Say a writer/director wants to change a line of dialogue in post because they’ve come up with something more effective, or funnier, more politically (in)correct, or what have you. The same technique applies: cut away to something in the surroundings or to another actor’s reaction and ADR the line. With some skillful audio engineering no one will be the wiser and the story gets a quick and easy touch-up.
Here’s an even more creative way to use ADR: writing in expletives between adult and child actors. The mouth movements of ’shin,’ ‘chin,’ ‘chit’ or a number of other words all look convincing enough on-camera to the common expletive we know and love. But these substituted words are easier on a child’s ears (and their parents, looking on from off-camera) and they can simply be overdubbed with the real swear words in post.
I saw this technique used in a (Comedy Central) Dave Chappelle Show episode where, in the skit, Dave’s ego is getting bruised by a little boy playing his son and, in usual hilarity, Dave is cussing out the kid for giving props to his father’s rival. Dave was able to make a scene using some uncensored, brutally funny ‘adult words’ on a kid because in reality the kid never heard those words. Looking closely at how his lips are moving we can see that Dave didn’t say the F-word or even the S-word in front of the child. He was saying words with a similar mouth movement (fudge?) and later simply dubbed in the real words in post.
Dialogue replacement sessions may not seem like creative time, but with a little brainstorming and planning they can be another chance for a savvy director to enhance a film’s writing and acting.
image credit- Darwin Bell
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