Myth: "Dramas don't need a lot of sound work".
While it's true that big action films do require a huge number of hard efects to be cut, a drama can be as demanding (or sometimes more) than a show full of explosions and gunshots. Producers and directors who don't have a lot of experience assume that, because their film is set in a suburban setting and has mostly dialogue, the sound post process is fairly simple (and therefore, inexpensive).
The truth is more complicated than that. When you don't have the dialogue being masked by loud effects, it is totally exposed and has to be really clean and great sounding to avoid distracting the audience. I just saw "Ocean's Thirteen" and, in some of its quiet scenes, I was pulled out from the story because the dialogue sounded muffled when it should have been pristine. This has been said countless times, but it's always worth repeating: if the sound calls attention to itself instead of complementing and enhancing the visuals, the job wasn't done right. The best-sounding movies I've seen have kept me glued to the story and, even though I do notice when some thing sounds particularly great ("Damn, that's good Foley!"), I know the audience won't be distracted.
The end result of dialogue sounding great is a combination of a good recording, an appropriate ADR assesment, a precise sync edit and clean-up, and a tasteful mix. Several times I have heard directors say, "We don't need any ADR on this film, the sync sound is perfect", and I always have to fight the urge to laugh. Unless the director is Robert Altman, ADR is an inevitable part of doing films, if they are to sound good. Usually, films that are ruled by the "No ADR" edict, end up feeling like no-budget films. On the other hand, there are many no-budget films that sound like they were done by a studio because the sound was done right. The trick is to know exactly how much ADR is needed, and only experienced sound supervisors and re-recording mixers can evaluate the sync sound properly.
Another point is that quiet scenes are harder to cut than big action scenes. When you have 80 tracks of gunshots, no one will notice if one of your footsteps in the middle of the main gun battle is out of sync by two frames (not that it should be, either). In a quiet conversation, Foley and ambiences play a huge role in selling the scene. In film, as in life, there is no such thing as silence (except in an anechoic chamber), and a scene where there is no room tone, no background ambience, no distant noises, no gentle movements of clothing, no subtle Foley sprinkles, is a shot where sound will stick out like a sore thumb. The audience won't know what is wrong, but they will be pulled out of the story and the illusion will be broken.
This level of precise work takes a lot of craftmanship and experience. If you add too little or too much, the scene won't play seamlessly. In many cases, you can cut a huge action scene with an ax – for a quiet scene, you need a scalpel and steady hands.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Monday, November 26, 2007
ADR for no-budget films (II)
Once you have all the recordings, it's time to start massaging the lines into place. If the naming of the files was done correctly and you have the marked script in hand, finding the lines should be very quick and easy.
A quick word on monitoring: unless you have a really quiet room to edit in and a decent set of studio-grade speakers, it's best to do this (and any dialogue editing, for that matter) on headphones. High-quality headphones, that is – not those Walkman-style flimsy things. If you can invest a bit over $100 on any piece of additional gear for your system, make it a pair of great headphones, like the Sony MDR-7506. You will always find them handy and they will save your butt many times.
In your master dialogue session, import all the files, including the takes that weren't marked as keepers. You may need to have alternate choices ready in case the director changes his or her mind. Create two sets of mono tracks, one for the chosen takes and one for the alternates (if the director didn't choose 'alts', you will need to choose one take per line that will be your alt take). The number of tracks will depend on how many lines overlap each other in the timeline. Have the same number of tracks for each set and name them ADR 1, ADR 2, ADR 3, ect. and ADR ALT 1, ADR ALT 2, ADR ALT 3, etc. After pulling the corresponding files into these tracks, make sure these new ADR regions are lined up to the original sync dialogue regions as closely as possible by using the waveforms as a visual reference.
Next, you have a few options. You can zoom in, cut the waveforms at zero-crossing points (where the waveform crosses the horizontal line in the middle of the track) and manipulate the pieces using the Time Compression/Expansion tool in ProTools. This requires a great deal of care, as you want to keep the lines from sounding unnatural or choppy. Another option is to get a hold of a trial demo of VocAlign (it's fully-functional and good for a few days – you can download it and the manual here). VocAlign speeds the process significantly by analysing both the original and the ADR lines and matching the waveforms automatically. It takes a bit of adjusting for each line, so be sure to read the manual to get the most out of it. As a side note, VocAlign comes as part of the DV Toolkit 2 package from Digidesign, which is good to get if you plan to stick with ProTools LE (although a bit pricey, in my opinion).
When every ADR line looks perfectly lined up to its sync counterpart, listen closely to all of them. They need to look and sound like the actor is actually saying them, obviously, but sometimes I've found that when shooting, some actors tend to speak without moving their lips much, and a perfectly clean ADR line will look funny, even though it's precisely in sync. The solution is to move the selected ADR take to an alternate track and look for a different take that is a bit less enunciated, more mumbled.
If you have done the rest of the dialogue edit, be sure to not delete any sync dialogue from the timeline. For every line you have replaced with ADR, there should also be an alternate ADR take and the original sync take. I recently worked with a seasoned dialogue editor who has done many films, and on this project he decided to give me just the selected ADR takes, with no alternates or the original sync takes. Of course, at the final mix, the director went ballistic because he wanted to try and use a few of the sync takes and they weren't available. So I had to pull up the uncut OMF to get to the original sync sound, phone the dialogue editor to ask him to bring me a folder with all the ADR alternates, and then edit the sync and alternate takes into my mix session. This was a huge waste of time, which could have been avoided by simply keeping those takes in, in the first place.
Later I will talk about mixing sync dialogue and ADR together to make them sound as similar as possible.
A quick word on monitoring: unless you have a really quiet room to edit in and a decent set of studio-grade speakers, it's best to do this (and any dialogue editing, for that matter) on headphones. High-quality headphones, that is – not those Walkman-style flimsy things. If you can invest a bit over $100 on any piece of additional gear for your system, make it a pair of great headphones, like the Sony MDR-7506. You will always find them handy and they will save your butt many times.
In your master dialogue session, import all the files, including the takes that weren't marked as keepers. You may need to have alternate choices ready in case the director changes his or her mind. Create two sets of mono tracks, one for the chosen takes and one for the alternates (if the director didn't choose 'alts', you will need to choose one take per line that will be your alt take). The number of tracks will depend on how many lines overlap each other in the timeline. Have the same number of tracks for each set and name them ADR 1, ADR 2, ADR 3, ect. and ADR ALT 1, ADR ALT 2, ADR ALT 3, etc. After pulling the corresponding files into these tracks, make sure these new ADR regions are lined up to the original sync dialogue regions as closely as possible by using the waveforms as a visual reference.
Next, you have a few options. You can zoom in, cut the waveforms at zero-crossing points (where the waveform crosses the horizontal line in the middle of the track) and manipulate the pieces using the Time Compression/Expansion tool in ProTools. This requires a great deal of care, as you want to keep the lines from sounding unnatural or choppy. Another option is to get a hold of a trial demo of VocAlign (it's fully-functional and good for a few days – you can download it and the manual here). VocAlign speeds the process significantly by analysing both the original and the ADR lines and matching the waveforms automatically. It takes a bit of adjusting for each line, so be sure to read the manual to get the most out of it. As a side note, VocAlign comes as part of the DV Toolkit 2 package from Digidesign, which is good to get if you plan to stick with ProTools LE (although a bit pricey, in my opinion).
When every ADR line looks perfectly lined up to its sync counterpart, listen closely to all of them. They need to look and sound like the actor is actually saying them, obviously, but sometimes I've found that when shooting, some actors tend to speak without moving their lips much, and a perfectly clean ADR line will look funny, even though it's precisely in sync. The solution is to move the selected ADR take to an alternate track and look for a different take that is a bit less enunciated, more mumbled.
If you have done the rest of the dialogue edit, be sure to not delete any sync dialogue from the timeline. For every line you have replaced with ADR, there should also be an alternate ADR take and the original sync take. I recently worked with a seasoned dialogue editor who has done many films, and on this project he decided to give me just the selected ADR takes, with no alternates or the original sync takes. Of course, at the final mix, the director went ballistic because he wanted to try and use a few of the sync takes and they weren't available. So I had to pull up the uncut OMF to get to the original sync sound, phone the dialogue editor to ask him to bring me a folder with all the ADR alternates, and then edit the sync and alternate takes into my mix session. This was a huge waste of time, which could have been avoided by simply keeping those takes in, in the first place.
Later I will talk about mixing sync dialogue and ADR together to make them sound as similar as possible.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
ADR for no-budget films (I)
I have been recording actors for a while, both for voiceover work and for dialogue replacement. Voiceover sessions are fairly straightforward – I'm looking to capture a good performance that will fit in specific places in the show's timeline. While some producers and actors like to read to picture, it still comes down to wiggling the lines a bit to make them fit, but you have a few extra frames to play with, and sometimes, even a few seconds. So it's not surgical precision, in most cases.
ADR, on the other hand, is a complex beast. You are matching a new recording on the actor's lips, so any discrepancy, no matter how small, will be noticed immediately. So a special degree of care, timing- and performance-wise, is needed. You not only have to be very mindful of "lip flap" (the words not matching the actor's lip movements), but also of performance likeness. For example, if the actor is whispering on screen, you want to record them delivering with the same intensity, or the result will look and sound very weird.
Many directors hate ADR, because they really want to keep the original performances, so they will try to avoid it at all costs. The problem is that sometimes, the original line is totally unusable (see my post "Some thoughts on production sound (I)"), and the director just won't accept the advice of the Supervising Sound Editor, which will impact very negatively the sound for the film. On the flip side, other directors will try to do as much ADR as possible, as they see it as a second chance at getting a better performance from the actors. This is very expensive and time-consuming, and for a small indie film, it can quickly eat up a large portion of the post budget. A few directors fall right in between, which is the healthiest position to be in – they understand that sometimes things go wrong at the shoot and it is imperative to replace some lines in post, so they try to make the most of it.
For the most part, ADR is recorded using a method of having the actor in a booth or a quiet stage, and playing the scene with the dialog line they are replacing on a screen several times so they can get the inflection and the timing right. They have a visual cue, which is a white vertical stripe (called "wipe") going across the screen (the dialogue line starts when the wipe reaches the right edge of the screen), and a sound cue, three beeps as a countdown (the dialogue line starts where the fourth beep would be). This requires some specialized gear, such as a wipe generator, a video player or a projector and a large screen. It also calls for a control room and a booth, or an acoustically treated soundstage.
Some people call ADR "looping", which is a term from the old days when a loop of fullcoat magnetic film was synced to a loop of optical film with the scene, and the actor would record the line several times to the magnetic film loop. This process was very slow compared to the one we use now, because it required a great deal of preparation for each line that had to be replaced.
A system for recording "poor man's ADR" involves a combination of both old and new, with a twist. You need a laptop computer with ProTools LE, an MBox (any model except the Micro), a headphone splitter or amp with at least three outputs, a few packing blankets, a microphone that is as close as possible to the one used on the actual shoot, four decent mic stands, and three sets of high-quality closed-ear headphones. The microphone, the headphones, the splitter and the mic stands are cheap to rent, so don't worry about buying them.
Find yourself a relatively quiet space (an office will do fine, as long as you turn off the AC or heating for the record). With three of the mic stands and the packing blankets, create a booth in a U shape. Place the fourth mic stand in the booth with the actual microphone. Make sure the back of the mic is facing one of the booth's side "walls". Place a table or desk in front of the booth's opening and set up the laptop with the interface and the headphone splitter. Have two chairs at the table in front of the booth – one for the engineer and one for the director. Everyone will wear a set of headphones.
You will need to create a ProTools session that contains all the lines to be replaced as separate clips on a single track, labeled "Guides". Create another track to record to. This track will reflect the character's name and the line being recorded. You will need a transcript of the film cut with every dialogue line numbered and with its timecode location marked down. So, when naming the track before recording, you'll type something that looks like "SG_ADR025_Jack". "SG" refers to the film's name, "ADR025" refers to the line number to be ADR'd, and "Jack" is the character's name. Set up ProTools to Loop Record. In the Edit window, make a selection on the timeline that spans roughly 2 times and a half the length of the guide region for the line to be ADR'd, starting at the top of that region. This way, when you record in loop mode, the actor will hear the line, and he or she will be able to repeat it right after, with the same intensity, inflection and pacing. Then the loop will repeat, the actor will hear the line again, and he or she will say it again, and so on, until the director is happy with the performance and you are sure the pacing is good. ProTools will number the takes automatically, so when you stop the recording, you will have all of them neatly labeled in the regions bin. Then you can rename the track to reflect the next line number and repeat the process. When the actor is done, rename the track again with the new character and line number.
It is a good idea to keep a copy of the film as a Quicktime movie in your hard drive, to allow the actor to watch the scenes and get a sense of the visual aspect before stepping into the booth to record. Have plenty of water bottles for everyone and keep a close eye on the actors to make sure they are as comfortable as possible. This method of working requires them to be very trustful of you, as it is an unconventional scheme, so you need to make them feel at ease.
In the next post, I will talk about how to best edit the recorded lines so the replacement is seamless.
ADR, on the other hand, is a complex beast. You are matching a new recording on the actor's lips, so any discrepancy, no matter how small, will be noticed immediately. So a special degree of care, timing- and performance-wise, is needed. You not only have to be very mindful of "lip flap" (the words not matching the actor's lip movements), but also of performance likeness. For example, if the actor is whispering on screen, you want to record them delivering with the same intensity, or the result will look and sound very weird.
Many directors hate ADR, because they really want to keep the original performances, so they will try to avoid it at all costs. The problem is that sometimes, the original line is totally unusable (see my post "Some thoughts on production sound (I)"), and the director just won't accept the advice of the Supervising Sound Editor, which will impact very negatively the sound for the film. On the flip side, other directors will try to do as much ADR as possible, as they see it as a second chance at getting a better performance from the actors. This is very expensive and time-consuming, and for a small indie film, it can quickly eat up a large portion of the post budget. A few directors fall right in between, which is the healthiest position to be in – they understand that sometimes things go wrong at the shoot and it is imperative to replace some lines in post, so they try to make the most of it.
For the most part, ADR is recorded using a method of having the actor in a booth or a quiet stage, and playing the scene with the dialog line they are replacing on a screen several times so they can get the inflection and the timing right. They have a visual cue, which is a white vertical stripe (called "wipe") going across the screen (the dialogue line starts when the wipe reaches the right edge of the screen), and a sound cue, three beeps as a countdown (the dialogue line starts where the fourth beep would be). This requires some specialized gear, such as a wipe generator, a video player or a projector and a large screen. It also calls for a control room and a booth, or an acoustically treated soundstage.
Some people call ADR "looping", which is a term from the old days when a loop of fullcoat magnetic film was synced to a loop of optical film with the scene, and the actor would record the line several times to the magnetic film loop. This process was very slow compared to the one we use now, because it required a great deal of preparation for each line that had to be replaced.
A system for recording "poor man's ADR" involves a combination of both old and new, with a twist. You need a laptop computer with ProTools LE, an MBox (any model except the Micro), a headphone splitter or amp with at least three outputs, a few packing blankets, a microphone that is as close as possible to the one used on the actual shoot, four decent mic stands, and three sets of high-quality closed-ear headphones. The microphone, the headphones, the splitter and the mic stands are cheap to rent, so don't worry about buying them.
Find yourself a relatively quiet space (an office will do fine, as long as you turn off the AC or heating for the record). With three of the mic stands and the packing blankets, create a booth in a U shape. Place the fourth mic stand in the booth with the actual microphone. Make sure the back of the mic is facing one of the booth's side "walls". Place a table or desk in front of the booth's opening and set up the laptop with the interface and the headphone splitter. Have two chairs at the table in front of the booth – one for the engineer and one for the director. Everyone will wear a set of headphones.
You will need to create a ProTools session that contains all the lines to be replaced as separate clips on a single track, labeled "Guides". Create another track to record to. This track will reflect the character's name and the line being recorded. You will need a transcript of the film cut with every dialogue line numbered and with its timecode location marked down. So, when naming the track before recording, you'll type something that looks like "SG_ADR025_Jack". "SG" refers to the film's name, "ADR025" refers to the line number to be ADR'd, and "Jack" is the character's name. Set up ProTools to Loop Record. In the Edit window, make a selection on the timeline that spans roughly 2 times and a half the length of the guide region for the line to be ADR'd, starting at the top of that region. This way, when you record in loop mode, the actor will hear the line, and he or she will be able to repeat it right after, with the same intensity, inflection and pacing. Then the loop will repeat, the actor will hear the line again, and he or she will say it again, and so on, until the director is happy with the performance and you are sure the pacing is good. ProTools will number the takes automatically, so when you stop the recording, you will have all of them neatly labeled in the regions bin. Then you can rename the track to reflect the next line number and repeat the process. When the actor is done, rename the track again with the new character and line number.
It is a good idea to keep a copy of the film as a Quicktime movie in your hard drive, to allow the actor to watch the scenes and get a sense of the visual aspect before stepping into the booth to record. Have plenty of water bottles for everyone and keep a close eye on the actors to make sure they are as comfortable as possible. This method of working requires them to be very trustful of you, as it is an unconventional scheme, so you need to make them feel at ease.
In the next post, I will talk about how to best edit the recorded lines so the replacement is seamless.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Myths in Post (I)
Myth: "The picture editor can edit and mix the sound for a show, because he has similar tools".
I think that the individuals who first made this statement didn't really believe it. My guess is that they were just trying to save money and justify it to the producers. So, unless we're talking about a Walter Murch or a Ben Burtt, this assertion is simply not true.
While it is true that Avid and Final Cut Pro systems have volume and panning automation and effects built-in, the level of control they have over the audio is very limited. When editing sound, very often it is needed to be sample-accurate (which, for standard audio post, would be accuracy to 1/48,000 of a second), to have proper crossfades between separate audio clips. Most video editing systems are only frame-accurate (1/30 or 1/25 a second), which doesn't allow for that level of precision. Furthermore, ProTools, the industry standard for sound editing and mixing, gives the editor the additional capability of redrawing the waveform itself, to eliminate pops and clicks seamlessly without having to cut the audio clip.
As far as "effects", apart from the huge collection of equalizers, compressors, limiters, pitch-shifters, reverbs, delays and noise-reduction processors that ProTools has available from third-party manufacturers, there is the added capability of automating every parameter of every one of them. So, for example, if the mixer wants to equalize a single syllable of a dialogue line differently, he can, with sample-accuracy. So, trying to mix in a video system is a bit like trying to cut a wedding cake with a spoon – you can "do it", but it's definitely not the same.
Another big difference is the listening environment. I've been to enough picture editing suites to know that sound is not a huge concern there – most rooms are noisy with computer fans running and humming outboard gear, and for the most part they are not acoustically treated. Many of them have cheap computer speakers. I've lost count of how many times a client comes to the final sound mix (in a proper sound mixing studio) and goes, "but I didn't hear that when we were editing picture!". Well, that's why. Sound editing and mixing studios have been acoustically analysed and treated, are quiet and have high-quality speakers.
And last, but certainly not least, there is the sound editor or mixer themselves. I know a few picture editors who have great ears, but they just don't know sound tools the way we do, or have done it for a very long time, as we have. Unless someone has devoted their life to learning both crafts (like Murch and Burtt), they only really know what they know. I wouldn't attempt to cut a show without first learning how to use the proper tools and having acquired the knowledge and experience necessary.
Luckily for the sound post community, the advent of HD and 5.1 is forcing more producers to employ a proper sound post team. The stringent specs of surround deliverables and the enforcement of items like dialog normalization call for special attention to detail regarding the sound of the final product. Hopefully this will soon start permeating to even the lowest budget shows.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
A little perspective
I receive a few e-mails every week from people who have just graduated from audio schools, asking me if I take interns for my company. So far, I have replied that I currently don't need an intern, but ask them to send me their résumes and so I can keep them handy in case I do need someone to help out. Almost all of them don't send it, or don't even respond at all. So I ask myself, why are graduates contacting every possible company for a job lead, and yet they don't follow through?
It's not enough to crash out of the gate shooting at everything you see. Persistence is what ultimately gets you a job and lets you keep it. Thousands of people apply for the same positions in this industry, but most companies don't care too much about your grades or where you went to school. If you are persistent in trying to get a job with them, they figure you really want it and will work hard to keep it.
For example – I met with a Toronto studio owner in 2002. He said they didn't need anyone at the time, but encouraged me to keep in touch. I started sending him e-mails every couple of months, just saying hello, telling him of news, what I was doing. At the end of 2004, many e-mails later, the position I wanted became available, and they called me in. I kept that job for more than two years, and after setting up my own company, I have continued doing a lot of work for them.
I went to audio school myself, so I know how graduates feel – the stress of not having an income and being forced to start at the very bottom. I vividly remember mopping the garage at a recording studio in Los Angeles because it flooded with rainwater, taking out the trash at a sound design shop in Santa Monica, and cleaning the basement at another one in Venice (California, not Italy). After a while of doing that sort of stuff, you start to get a different perspective on things.
When you are starting out, good employers don't make you "pay your dues" because they want you to feel insignificant – they want to make sure you can handle responsibility before giving it to you. If someone can't do storage backups efficiently, what is the chance that they will be able to run their own session and make the company look good?
So, that is my advice – be persistent and follow through. That's about the only way you stand a good chance of making it.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Cleaning dialogue for fun and profit
As a segue from my previous post, this one is about dealing with the results from a bad location recording. The damage is done and the sound post team has to address it.
Most of the time, a spotting session is done to assess all the problems in the recordings. This session is attended by the director, the dialogue editor(s) and the supervising sound editor, or the re-recording mixer, if he is supervising the sound for the project. It is at this point that the dialogue lines that need to be replaced with ADR are flagged and logged. The reasons for doing ADR are either extreme noise on the line or a performance issue that the director feels can be improved.
The projects for which ADR is not done are documentaries and studio shows taped in front of a live audience. In these cases, we're stuck with the sync sound and it is up to us to make it presentable. The problems and methods to deal with them include:
• Incidental noises: these include stuff like audience coughs, cell phones, crew footsteps, lavalier microphones rubbing against clothes, very loud lip smacks, etc.
They need to be removed or minimised as much as possible, as they are very distracting to the viewer. In many cases, they happen between words so they can easily be edited out in ProTools and filling the gap with ambient noise from the same microphone. Many times, though, they will occur in the middle of words. The only options are to either try to EQ the noise out by pulling down its main frequency range, or finding a word or syllable from the same person in the same scene to replace the unusable one.
• Broadband noise: this is constant noise over the whole line. It can be an electric generator, distant traffic, open ocean ambience, tape hiss, steady wind, etc.
The best way to deal with this kind of noise is by using multiband expanders (Waves' C4, WaveArts Multidynamics 5), noise reduction plug-ins (Waves' X-Noise, WaveArts MR Noise) and parametric EQs to find and cut the most offending frequency range.
Multiband expanders work by taking anything below a certain level in a certain frequency range and making it quieter. So, for example, if you have noise that lives in the low frequencies, you would set your processor's threshold and expansion ratio fairly high for that range, and it would only lower the level for those frequencies whenever the signal goes below the set threshold.
Noise reduction processors work by analysing a sample of the noise and substracting that noise "signature" from the rest of the signal, leaving anything that isn't noise largely untouched. The problem is, if you go overboard with it, the dialogue itself will be affected and you'll get "artifacts", digital imperfections on the signal that will make it sound unnatural and boxy.
Parametric EQs are the most straightforward but less effective processors for dealing with this kind of noise. Basically, find the most offending frequency range by selecting a frequency with a medium bandwidth, boost it way up and sweep the entire frequency spectrum until you find a spot where the noise is at its worst sounding. Then turn down that frequency range until the noise is minimised without affecting the dialogue too adversely.
It is best to use a combination of these judiciously to clean up broadband noise – you'll get much better results than by picking just one and overusing it.
Some lines with some broadband noise may not be flagged for ADR in live action shows because the noise is determined by the supervising sound editor to be not too severe and it is decided that it can be cleaned up in the mix.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Some thoughts on production sound
The single biggest challenge a re-recording mixer faces every day (apart from what to get for lunch) is fixing bad-sounding production sound, or 'sync' sound. In layman's terms, when a film or a TV show is shot, the goal, as far as the sound guys are concerned, is to capture the dialogue between the actors. The rest of the sound is added later, from footsteps (which are performed to picture by the Foley artist) to gunshots and explosions (added in by the sound fx editors).
Many times, thorough inexperience, or just lack of care from the production crew, the sync sound isn't good. Some examples of this are:
1. You can clearly hear loud noises in the recordings, like electricity generators, overhead airplanes, people hammering nearby, or even conversations between crew members.
A director I work with, Sheldon Wilson, is so sound-conscious that he continuosly checks the entire set himself to make sure there isn't anything making any noise. In the end, his films have very little ADR because the recordings are very clean. So the producer is happy because they don't have to spend so much on ADR, Sheldon is happy because we get to use most of the performances on film, and I'm happy because I get nice, clean dialogue that integrates nicely with the music and sound effects.
On a certain film I worked on for another director, there was a scene with a party – many people chatting, glasses clinking and two of the lead actors having a conversation in the foreground. No one told the director that, when shooting those kind of scenes, the extras are supposed to just pretend they are actually talking and making noise. But these people were just blabbing away at full volume, laughing and having a blast. Needless to say, the whole scene had to be ADR'd.
2. The boom guy is inexperienced or doesn't care, and the boom microphone is not pointing toward the actors when they are saying their lines. Sometimes in the recordings you hear their dialogue bouncing off the walls of the room instead of the sound coming directly from their mouths.
A good location sound mixer/boom operator team is invaluable. If you can find them, hold on to them for dear life – they will save you a lot of time and grief later on. They are quite comfortable pointing out problems to the director and the producer in a very diplomatic and persuasive way. They will advise for the actors to wear slippers when shooting close ups and medium shots, because footsteps on film set floors for the most part don't sound like they're supposed to. They will learn the scene from the script to make accurate boom moves from one actor to the next. And most importantly, they will not be afraid to ask for another take or for thirty seconds of silence to record the room tone.
3. The wireless lavalier microphones that are attached to the actors are badly concealed in their clothes, so the sound is muffled and every time they move you can hear the fabric rustling against the mic's surface.
A good location sound team will work with the costume supervisor to use fabrics that don't scratch the mic surface and create noise, and that are acoustically more friendly. They will also make the actors feel comfortable when putting on and taking off lav mics and transmitter packs.
4. The sound is distorted because the location sound mixer wasn't monitoring and adjusting his recording levels to accomodate louder lines of dialogue, or because the batteries in the transmitter packs for the wireless mics haven't been changed frequently, and radio transmitters really hate old batteries.
Again, a good location sound mixer is very thorough and organised, has a good knowledge of the script, – and has been to the rehearsals – which allows him to know the dynamics of the scene to avoid level overloads, and keeps his rig well mantained at all times, including fresh batteries, daily tested cables and mics, and a clean recorder with lots of spare media.
5. The sound crew notices any of these problems and asks the novice director for another take, but their pleas fall on deaf ears. The common response with certain directors and producers is "We'll ADR it, let's move on" or, even worse, "It's OK, they can fix it in the mix".
Usually, directors and producers who are financing the whole film out of their own pockets learn very quickly the importance of avoiding this. "Fixing it in post" is very expensive and can potentially make a project both go over budget and miss its deadlines. On the other hand, directors whose first film was a multi-million-dollar action fest tend to underestimate the importance of this problem.
More to come...
Monday, November 12, 2007
An introduction...
Whenever I'm at a party and someone asks me, "And what do you do?", my automatic response is "That is a really good question!". Not because I don't know, but because, as every other sound designer or re-recording mixer knows, it's just a hard question to answer satisfactorily, without getting a blank stare in return.
Sound post-production for film and television has always been an obscure occupation for the average person. We sound post guys get frustrated that everyone thinks that when a movie is shot, everything happens right there. So, obviously, it's hard for them to understand why someone other than maybe the guy who writes the music is needed later on.
Even within the professional audio-visual community, there are many people who confuse the title "sound designer" with the title "composer". Many others call re-recording mixing "audio sweetening". There are a multitude of misconceptions that have been passed over from one person to the next in a viral way, and nowadays sometimes it's really hard to know what some clients are expecting for their money. "But I thought you were doing the sound design!", says the client. "I did," says the sound designer,"but you need a mixer to mix what I did". So we find ourselves in a position of having to educate our clients more often than not, to avoid potential disasters later on.
Hopefully this blog will fill in some of the blanks for those of you who specialize in other areas of filmmaking, or those of you who are taking their first steps in the sound post world, or even those of you who just like to know how we do what we do out of curiosity. I will not pretend to know everything or the best way of doing things, so everyone is more than welcome to debate my points of view here. That is, by the way, a great way for me to learn new things. What I'll post here is stuff that have worked for me over the years and a few humorous anecdotes depicting the sometimes crazy people and situations that we often run into.
So, welcome. Here we go...
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