Post-Production Diary: ADR
18 January 2008 in Blog | Comments enabled

This week, Josh and I spent 3 days recording the ADR for our feature. For those of you who don’t know what that is, ADR stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement. (Or Additional Dialogue Recording.) Check out wikipedia’s article for more info about ADR.

This was a fun but tedious experience. We basically had the actors come in one at a time and re-record clean versions of their dialogue. I’d say 30% of the film needs ADR. There are a couple of ways to do it but we chose to loop the dialogue. The actor hears one line of dialogue play over and over again and they try and match it as best they can.

In some cases we tweaked the performance a little. Recording ADR was a fun little exercise in directing. You really see how the vocal inflections are determined by the actor’s emotion and how this can be changed by direction. They say actors hate to be given a line reading by the director. We did our best not to do this. And it was amazing how we could get our actors to give the right inflection by giving them a playable emotion or feeling to evoke. That was the fun part.

The tedious part was sitting in a cramped room for 10 hours a day hearing the same dialogue over and over again. Three days in a row. Our actors were really gracious to give us so much time. I think they are all anxious for the film to be complete.
We still have another couple of light days to do for the smaller parts. We’ll get to that next week.

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On a side note, I just watched four films that I’ve never seen before.

1) The Outsiders: Coppala’s film starring every teen actor in the 80’s. I liked the film for the most part. It was a little slow and it meandered. I wonder if I would like it more if I had seen it earlier in my life. I thought the Karate Kid did a good job. But was it just me, or was Rob Lowe’s character waaay to “loving” to Pony Boy? That was creepy. I give it 2 stars (just because of Soda Pop’s love affair with Pony Boy.)

2) The Warriors: “Warriors, come out to play-ay.” A fun but very cheesy movie. Reminded me a little of Swartzenneger’s Running Man. I give it 3 stars.

3) Star Trek: The Motion Picture: I’m so glad the filmmakers of the sequels abandoned the 2001: A Space Oddyssey feel. Man, what a slow movie. And nothing really ever happens. The ending was interesting. Finding the ___ at the heart of V’ger. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it. The only thing I really enjoyed about this movie was the score. Jerry Goldsmith, why did you have to die? Two stars. Would have been one but Jerry kept me going.

4) Sling Blade: I never got around to seeing this when it came out and have avoided it for years. I thought it would be like Of Mice and Men which almost caused me to commit suicide after I saw it. But, I finally watched it this past week and although the ending isn’t super happy, it isn’t as bad as Of Mice and Men. I went around doing Sling Blade impressions all week. I’m really behind on that trend. “I guess I give that thar film 4 stars, Mmm hmm.”