Dialogue Editing

CHAPTER 11
Image, Depth, and Perspective
So far we’ve concerned ourselves with making scenes smooth and believable.
We’ve looked at ways to even out ugly shot transitions and examined what
to do when faced with many tracks from which to choose. Unfortunately,
these are the very procedures that some editors point to when claiming that
dialogue editing is boring and wanting of soul. “Sound effects editing is fi lled
with opportunities for artistic expression, but not so dialogue!” Rubbish.
You have to do your basic scene balancing before you can get to the fun stuff.
It’s very diffi cult to manipulate subtle changes in the focus of a scene if you
can’t hear past the room tone explosions at each edit. In the same way, you
can’t paint your walls until you fi x the falling plaster. Once your scenes run
smoothly, however, and there are no serious problems with noises or offmicrophone
sound, you’re ready to begin adding some life to the dialogue.
In this chapter we’ll begin to turn fl at dialogue into something with depth,
focus, and story.
Dialogue in the Soundscape
Film dialogue is overwhelmingly mono, usually coming exclusively from the
center speaker. 1 As shockingly retro as this may seem, there are good reasons
for it. Logic tells us that the apparent sound source of a line of dialogue
should mimic its visual source. Given the ever growing number of channels
on a big-league fi lm print, you’d think we’d take advantage of some of those
channels and move the dialogue around the screen. See it on the left; hear it
on the left. Same goes for the right. Moving character? No problem, automate
a pan from left to center to right and into the audience. Simple? Yes, but set
1 Such generalizations are always dangerous. There are, of course, stereo dialogue fi lms
and there are giant gee-whiz fi lms that place dialogue all around the screen because, well,
they can. And there are artistic fi lms that play with stereo images for reasons beyond those
of traditional narrative.
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