Additional/Alternate/Automated Dialog Replacement/Recording (ADR).
There’s lots of ways to do this, we’ve tried a bunch, but we like this one. I call it, Three And Repeat. The idea is that the mind is a wonderful mimic, but if there is too much input, the mind tends to favor sight rather than sound. If an actor is trying to speak lines, and match lip movement to a character he/she played some time ago and then act on top of all that, then no wonder people hate ADR, and why it’s so expensive.
To start an ADR session you really have to prepare. We start by importing a film sequence into the DAW. We get a film strip and the associated audio.
Next we find the dialog in the audio track for each character that needs replacing. We make three copies of each spoken line and set them side by side.
The actor will hear the line three times and then repeat it three times. The gray track is the recorded ADR.
Here’s what that sounds like…
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/80285340″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”80″ iframe=”true” /]
After a few lines we’ll let the actor take five while we see if we have some good matches. We sync up the takes and watch for lip movement, the director watches/listens for performance and hopefully we have some winners. In the audio file below you can hear the original on top of the ADR – listen for sync..
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/80285341″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”80″ iframe=”true” /]
The first part is OK, we will try to move around the second part…
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/80285343″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”80″ iframe=”true” /]
After checking with the picture for sync, we have a good take to pass along to the Dialog Editor and Re-Recording Mixer so they may Worldize the ADR – more about that later.
But just for fun let’s throw in a little Room Tone.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/80285346″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”80″ iframe=”true” /]
And a little room….
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/80285345″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”80″ iframe=”true” /]
…it’s getting there.
