ADR and Hell Pizza
Audio post production, Sound fx, the soundtrack and audio post mixing for film and TV is often under estimated and overlooked by the general public in the finished product. Often if the music and audio post production mix is done REALLY well it’s designed to not be noticed, in fact it’s usually only noticed when it’s done badly. There’s a real art and skill to piecing together a dynamic and emotive sound mix for film or tv and one very important part of that is the dialogue recording. Whether it’s an action, a horror, a rom com or even a doco the dialogue is very important, the watcher must be able to easily hear what is being said, and this can be extremely tricky if you’ve decided to record your audio on location and there’s the lighting guy’s generator cranking, or planes flying overhead, it’s near impossible to get a good clean take of every line. So the process of ADR was invented and implemented.
ADR or Automatic dialogue replacement is essentially the process of ‘over dubbing’ good clean audio takes of the dialogue. It’s most usually a case of getting the actors back after the shoot, have them come into an audio recording studio (like the sitting room) and re recording each of their lines, mimicking exactly how they delivered the lines during the actual shoot. Now, clearly this is a very time consuming process and there’s a lot of factors here that can make or break a good ADR session. Consider such things as:
- Microphone placement or distance to the speaker vs how far away they are on screen
- Emotion and being able to exactly replicate ‘how’ something was said
- Movement, if lines were being delivered whilst running or eating, they sound very different to just standing still in front of a microphone
- And phrasing, I can say the same thing in different ways 100’s of times without even consciously trying to do so.
Given all this, the role and job of being able to record and/or re deliver your dialogue lines is tricky even at the best of times. Once again, if the ADR recording and editing is done well then it’s hardly noticabe even to a trained eye/ear… done badly and things can be out of sync or just sound wrong. The Sitting Room recorded and edited the and fingers crossed there’s not too many points where it’s too noticeable !
Check out this great video about all the issues sound production and audio post teams face on big film shoots: