Dialogue Editing

CHAPTER 18
The Mix
A gymnast will spend years preparing for a 3-minute Olympic performance,
a pianist will endure months of 12-hour practice sessions in preparation for
a competition, and fi remen repeatedly drill for something they hope will
never happen. In comparison, dialogue editors have it pretty easy. Still, like
the gymnast, for the past few weeks you’ve been preparing for one brief,
intense experience: the dialogue premix.
Over the course of a few days, you’ll fi nd out whether your editing decisions
were sound and whether you constructed your tracks in such a way that the
mixer (whom you may never have met) can quickly move beyond “making
it less horrible” to using your work to breathe life into the fi lm.
Each day during the premix, the producer will spend far more than a week’s
worth of your salary, so the pressure to perform is high. There’s a balance
between getting it done well and getting it done at all. Moments when you
think you’re a genius are sideswiped by self-doubt when you realize that you
misjudged a scene.
It’s your last hurrah, and there’s never, ever enough time. In short, the experience
is thrilling, rewarding, scary, and overwhelmingly enjoyable.
Premix Goals
Two confl icting goals guide the premix: One, to see that scenes are smoothed,
perspectives are established, sound is shaped, and ADR is matched;
and, two, to ensure that important, volatile elements aren’t forever merged
with the rest of a scene. Options must be held open for the fi nal mix, when
all of the other sound elements are available for comparison. That’s when the
director absolutely, positively must make decisions—when the buck fi nally
stops.
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