Dialogue Editing

170 NOW, THE ACTUAL EDITING
laugh, and the laughter builds until they’re interrupted by their
humorless father. Since the girls are partly hidden by a doorframe in
the master long shot, the picture editor layers several takes of the
girls’ squealing. No major lip-sync problems, he reasoned, so why not
make the scene “beefi er” this way? On an initial screening of the fi lm,
this trick might go unnoticed. You’ll play along with the intensifying
frolicking and likely not realize that rather than just three voices—one
for each girl—you’re hearing six or nine or more. The catch: This
doesn’t make sense. Even if most viewers can’t initially identify the
problem with the scene, they’ll feel the scene is clogged, undisciplined,
and without dynamics.
You’re editing the production sound of a car chase. What in the Avid
screening seemed like a reasonably exciting collage of revving and
squealing and shifting just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The engines
aren’t consistent, the points of view aren’t well planned, and more
often than not a car “speaks” with two or more voices at once. This
isn’t believable, and it doesn’t develop. It lacks dynamics and seems to
have no sound plot. Of course, in a car chase scene most of the work
will fall into the lap of the sound effects editor. Still, you’ll fi nd
yourself in situations like this, where the picture editor considered
ever escalating noise a substitute for exciting sound editing. Analyze
each shot to decide what’s important, then develop a plot to the car
chase’s sound. In action scenes, each shot is usually about one thing
and one thing only, so press your point on that single detail.
You’re editing a documentary, and the picture editor has created a
voiceover from a character’s interview footage. In one case, he placed
the attack of a new line under the ringout4 of the previous one to keep
a correct rhythm and prevent an unnatural pause in the sentence. The
result, however, is a double-voicing. We simultaneously hear two
elements of the character’s voice, a vocal technique you’ll fi nd only in
Tibetan monasteries. Never allow more than one element of any
character’s voice—words, breaths, nonverbal vocalizations—to play
together. There are very few ironclad rules in this book, but this is
one of them: People can make only one vocal sound at a time.
4 In this context, attack refers to the leading edge of a sound—the fi rst modulation of a
phrase. When discussing dynamic processors, attack means the speed with which the
processor responds to an input signal. Ringout is the acoustic residue (echo, reverb,
diffusion) left at the end of a phrase.