Dialogue Editing

248 ADR
Perspective and voice quality. Sometimes it’s simply impossible to record
a shot: very wide shots with lots of headroom and no place to put the
boom; scenes shot in overly “boomy” spaces; weird sound refl ections.
Acting. Some of the worst ADR nightmares occur when the director
or editor doesn’t like the read on a line and wants to “improve” it.
This can turn into recording hell, since the director’s new idea of the
“right” read may not match the gestures or acting energy of the image
on the screen. But try we must.
Line changes. Sometimes lines have to be changed to fi x story
problems. This is where you become an expert at squeezing new text
into old sync shots without it looking like a Godzilla movie. It rarely
works.
Focus control. To isolate the characters from their surroundings you
may have to rerecord their lines. Imagine you’re working on a scene
in which your two protagonists are surrounded by rioting, noisy
Bolsheviks bent on malfeasance. In order to get inside the heads of
our besieged heroines, the supervising sound editor decides to
progressively peel away the sounds of the mob until nothing but the
protagonists’ dialogue and Foley remain. The mob’s voices fade away,
followed by their Foleys and then the other sounds. We’re left with
something far scarier than the roar of the crowd: a subjective view of
the scene. Of course, to pull this off we have to loop all of the dialogue
of the protagonists as well as any visible sync utterances from the
crowd. Later we’ll record group loop for the crowd.
There are many other reasons to replace a sync line. What’s important about
replacement lines is that you have to prepare the track so that the new ADR
line can be mixed with the rest of the dialogue. More on this later.
Adding Lines
Not all ADR lines are intended to replace mangled, damaged, or drowned-out
production lines. Some of them are added on top of the dialogue.
Story details (a.k.a. narrative emergency surgery). If the story is
foundering because a few critical facts have gone missing, wellplaced
clarifi cations might save the day, like the antagonist muttering
a bit of vital information while passing behind a post. Decades of
exposition have taken place during a long driving scene in buddy
fi lms. You thought those beauty shots out the window were just to
celebrate nature? Not entirely; that’s a great time to plug story holes,
reveal details about characters, and up the tension ante. Similarly, a