| Film Fanatic August 2003
Now Close Your Eyes and Listen: Part One
Stop where you are (provided you are not standing in
the middle of the street), close your eyes, and listen. What do you hear? If you are in a
shopping mall, you will hear the din of people walking around you, laughing, talking, and
shopping. If you are in the middle of a park, then you may hear a breeze chuffing against
your ears and moving through the leaves in the trees. You may hear a car screeching its
tires in the distance or a young child crying after he fell and scraped his knee. Ducks
could be quacking in a pond nearby, or you could hear the sound of an ice-cream
truck’s bell summoning children from a nearby playground.
Now block your ears and try to move around, forward,
backward, and to the side without your ears guiding you. Chances are, you will stumble
into someone or lose track of your position relative to the world around you. Your eyes
may show you where everything is, but your ears allow you to judge dimension and context.
In a film, pictures may convey a wealth of information about how something looks or
behaves, but the sounds give weight and body to the image.
Like sight, it is easy to take our sense of hearing for
granted. Sounds are all around us: waves of energy displace molecules of air; voices,
music, and various objects disturb the atmosphere. Many of these arrive at our ears, and
our brain ultimately processes them. While humans may take hearing for granted, we
certainly know when something sounds wrong, and it’s the job of a film’s audio
team to make sure every element within a film’s soundtrack sounds real.
Elements in the mix: dialogue
A film’s soundtrack incorporates dialogue, sound
effects, and music. These elements reside in one or more "tracks," which can be
contained either on physical audiotape or within the virtual environment of audio editing
software. During the final stages of editing, these tracks are mixed together and form a
film’s soundtrack.
Dialogue, or the voices a film’s characters convey, is
the most difficult aspect of a soundtrack to get right. In a perfect world the dialogue of
a film is recorded live while the scene is being filmed. But unless a scene is recorded in
a controlled environment -- like a studio’s soundstage -- problems with equipment and
atmospheric noise at the location can cripple any chance for a clean recording. I have
been on location sets where the sounds from a building’s climate control system, the
buzz from fluorescent lights, and even the film camera have contaminated an actor’s
dialogue with unwanted noise. Dealing with noise on location can be very annoying, and
more importantly, costly to a film production. And sometimes there is simply no way to get
around it.
In cases where capturing live sound proves impossible, an
Automatic Dialogue Replacement editor (ADR) is called in during post-production. Using a
method called "looping," the ADR editor re-records the actors’ dialogue and
matches it back to their lips in the film image. Looping literally means that the filmed
scene is looped over and over while the actors repeat their lines. The dialogue is
performed until the ADR matches the original emotional quality and timing of the scene
with the newly recorded material.
But re-recording dialogue is not as simple as having an
actor speak into a microphone. The newly recorded voices must appear as if they were
recorded with the original image, at the location in which the action took place. There
are noises and qualities that give definition to a voice in a unique space: the echo of a
person’s voice in a cave, the muffled quality of a voice in the padded cell of a
psychopath, or the sound of a wood floor creaking in the background as an actor’s
weight is applied to the floorboards. Each contributes to a unique sonic signature that is
a composite of sounds created within a space.
A foley artist recreates footsteps and other sonic details
of the scene and records them on a foley track. If you were to visit a foley artist, you
would probably see a collection of shoes and plastic basins filled with surfaces like
concrete, asphalt, and gravel. You may even see a frozen chicken and hatchet for those
horror scenes where the sound of an axe coming in contact with a human skull may be
needed. A foley’s job is not only to add physical noises that are natural to a scene,
but also to add texture and presence.
Glitches within the mix
 There is nothing more distracting than
hearing a bad ADR edit or foley effect within a film. Problems with the relative tonality
of a voice or bad lip sync can be even more debilitating to an audience’s suspension
of disbelief than a continuity error.
The film True Lies uses ADR and foley in many
instances, and while the majority of these edits appear seamless, some do stick out. Take
the exciting and original rescue scene where Harry Tasker is struggling to rescue his
wife, Helen, from an out-of-control limousine. If you listen closely you’ll hear and
see subtle differences between the lips of the actors and their words as well as the
relative tonality of sound between cuts. Close-ups of Harry and Helen are perfect because
they were probably done in a soundstage as opposed to on the bridge. Wider shots, like the
one where Harry and Helen are shouting, "The bridge is out," have noticeable ADR
applied. The filmmakers do a nice job using the chaos of the situation to make it seem as
if wind and noise are displacing the voices, but if you look at the lip sync you’ll
see that the voices were not recorded at the same time as the original action.
If you want to see a more egregious hiccup in an ADR edit,
take a look at the concluding scene, where Harry’s daughter Dana Tasker is hanging
from a construction crane and shouting for help. You’ll notice that she screams,
"Help me," twice as she turns her head toward the crane. Both the movement of
her head and the second "Help me" look and sound wrong. The exclamation sounds
as if it was repeated in the sound edit and not by the actress.
Musicals are typically replete with ADR and foley-related
glitches. Watch a music video or even a film like Moulin Rouge! and you’ll
notice problems with lip sync as well as diction. Anything can happen during the six
months of a film’s production. For instance, actors could lose their voices due to a
cold or fatigue. In these cases the actors will mime their lines with the same lip
movements and formation of consonants that the song requires. What can’t always be
mimicked are the passion and soul that actually singing the lines creates. As a result,
the audience will sense a certain fakeness in the singing, as if the words are physically
detached from the person singing them.
Next month we’ll continue our discussion about sound.
We'll talk about the magic behind sound effects, and how today’s surround-sound
technology and lower-noise recording techniques have made the job of a sound-effects
editor more challenging.
...Anthony Di Marco
anthony@hometheatersound.com |
