Dialogue Editing

Making Sense of a Scene 169
resources of the location mixer. 3 Long before shooting begins, the location
mixer must meet with the supervising sound editor, the picture editor, and
the postproduction manager or producer. (A quick get-together in the hotel
bar the night before the shoot doesn’t count.) The result of this meeting will
be a fl owchart that everyone has agreed on, understands, and signed off on.
Done well, a multitrack project recorded on hard disk, picture-edited with a
mono mix, and sound-edited with all available tracks will pass without a
hitch. Mess up the communications along the way and you’ll have a nightmare
on your hands. And you, the dialogue editor, will likely to be the one
to bear the brunt.
Once you have all of the tracks—whether by fi le-matching the original BWF
fi les or by opening an OMF from an appropriately endowed picture workstation—you
have innumerable choices before you. However, the actual editing
is no different from any other job. And as with all editing, you must make
choices fi rst. Even if you have six tracks to choose from, odds are that at any
given moment only one character is speaking. Lose the other tracks, but don’t
delete what you don’t need. Instead, move it to a junk track, in sync. If you
have a hunch that an unused track may be wanted in the mix, prepare it and
move it to an easily accessible track. Choose wisely when selecting which
track to use, and the rest of the process will go amazingly well.
Making Sense of a Scene
Dialogue editing is the last line of defense against a scene that doesn’t make
sense. Granted, there’s not much you can do if the narrative itself is falling
apart, but you can prevent the soundtrack from adding to or even creating
the folly. For example, when a scene is supposed to be exciting or busy, a
picture editor may stack up production sounds, feeling that “more is more.”
This works when the sounds in the sonic soup—each and every one—make
sense and have specifi c roles to play. But when sounds are dolloped indiscriminately,
whether by a picture editor or a sound editor, the result isn’t
excitement. It’s a mess.
Here are some examples of poorly thought out, faux-exciting scenes:
Three ten-year-old girls are playing in a bedroom. They begin to dance
and spin. As they become more vivacious, they start to giggle and
3 There are several good articles about managing the workfl ow of multitrack fi lm
projects. To learn more, see the Suggested Readings at the end of this chapter.