Dialogue Editing

The Documentary Workspace 299
worse?” The answer is that they were looking at content. You’re looking at
sound.
Listen to a bumpy edit between two regions and identify the sound transition.
It might be a long vowel moving to a sharp consonant or perhaps a stop,
like a T followed by a vowel. Whatever it is, look through the transcripts to
fi nd similar-sounding transitions, although not necessarily the same words.
The fi lm editor may have overlooked a good sound transition because
she was concerned with meaning, which requires longer word strings,
while you care only about transition sounds. Naturally, you’ll begin by
looking for exactly the same words in combination to get the most natural
results.
Sometimes you have to time-stretch parts of a region to create a better cadence.
Remember to save the original region in case your efforts fail or you need a
clean starting point for a single region that requires several kinds of time
squeezing. Also remember to open up the handles of the original region
before changing the speed or duration of the fi le, since this will give you
greater fl exibility when you splice the new region into the sentence. You may
need to selectively change the pitch of certain regions for the string to make
more sense.
Whether adjusting length, speed, or pitch, don’t reprocess an already processed
soundfi le. If you need to fi ne-tune your parameters, you’re far better
off returning to the original and modifying your settings, as discussed in
Chapter 15. All of these processes are unfriendly to sound quality, so repeatedly
process a soundfi le if what you want is a horrible line of dialogue.
When the editor hands you a string of voiceover edits that just don’t fi t
together, don’t be shy about replacing words with more sound-appropriate
alternates. Keep the original regions in case you or the director is unhappy
with the new construction, but be as bold as necessary to recreate believable
sentences. Remember, the director and editor created these strings by assembling
dismembered words, so you’re under no greater obligation to honor the
integrity of their unworkable assembly than they were to honor the integrity
of the dailies. Just make it work.
Termination
It’s common for a documentary fi lmmaker to chop off a sentence in order to
bend its meaning. “It’s true: I shot him as he was running toward me with a
chainsaw” may be too fact-laden for the fi lmmaker, so he’ll turn his villain’s
words into an easier to understand “It’s true: I shot him.” Period.