Having seen the things we shot edited and put onto a timeline with the sound synced up I realised two things, firstly that Andrew Rogers is one hell of an editor, completely of his own creativity he managed to put together a good film with some fragmented scenes and sections that didn't seem to have any way to fit together. And secondly, that we needed some ADR (truth be told, I knew I needed this anyway as at the very least we needed to record the closing line) but having listened to some of the cave scenes back there is other voices in the background of the scene from some people on the other side of the cave wall. That being said we had to get the three actors in to do some dubbing of the scenes, which I must admit was my first attempt at this but Ryan (who is on sound and in charge of the mix) has done it before so I was blessed in this sense to have his expertise.
The set up went something like this: A mic with guard (in picture) opposite the TV that was used to play the scenes we were dubbing, this is to help the actors in getting the feel for the emotion and also to help them with syncing their lines to their mouths. From the Tv there is a HDMI to the laptop which is where the playback actually comes from. Then the headphones that Stephen has on come from the back of the TV so that he can hear the original audio. Then the mic is hooked up to an audio mixer which in turn is hooked up to a mac which is running audacity to record the audio. A very simple but incredibly effective set up. So first up for dubbing once we were set up was Stephen, he had to sync his words with the footage of him getting up and trying to talk Alex out of his decision. This took a few play throughs of the clip before Stephen was comfortable to go for a take and then the first few takes were a little off, though this is to be expected and we had plenty of time, so we simply talked about whether he was a little fast or slow and went from there, after a few more attempts he had it nailed and Ryan said it sounded fine on his end so we did another take for coverage and then moved on. Next up was Gary, this was an easier thing to dub as there was no visuals to match up to, I just needed him to say "fuck you" a few times and in a few different ways.
So to do this with Gary I simply showed him the original clip so he could get the spacing right between lines and then we rolled one big take of him saying it multiple times and in different way so that we had a variety to choose form in the edit when we put it into the film. There was a line a bit later on with Gary that also needed dubbing and required a lip sync, however, we were accidentally very lucky with this in that in the scene he lifts his arm so we can't actually see his mouth and as such the only thing he had to do was the pacing so that it fit into the shot, matching the exact words wasn't an issue; I'd like to say I got him to raise his arm for this reason but it is not at all the case, we just caught a break on this one. It is worth mentioning at this point that Stephen also had more lip syncing to do but it went largely the same as his first attempt so there is not need in me going into great detail over this. Next up in the booth (not really a booth but it sounds cool to say) was Stephanie, she had the most to do in terms of scenes.
The first thing she had to do was the bit where she gets out of the sleeping bag and shouts at Alex. This was a fairly difficult piece because firstly there was the timing to nail of her getting out and giving the line as she does, this took a few attempts in itself but Stephanie was great in her defence and had the timing nailed fairly quickly, the next issue was the lip syncing, this was made easier by the fact that the timing was now spot on, the only issue was getting the pronunciation the same so that the mouth movements match up, in fairness, once the timing is the same it will match visually only the keenest of eyes will spot something wrong I feel, though that being said I am something of a perfectionist and wanted to nail it as closely as possible to the original delivery, needless to say after a few attempts more she had it and we did some coverage takes and moved on to the next bit. This was Stephanie saying that Alex made himself the bad guy. Much like Gary's delivery of the "fuck you's" we didn't see her in the scene and so the emphasis was on the emotion and range of delivery so we had plenty to work with creatively. So we did the line a few times and she gave a range and then I asked her to swap the line over so it went from "you did this yourself, you made yourself the bad guy" to "you made yourself the bad guy, you did this to yourself" after recording the second one a few times I felt I prefer the second but this may change when we get to the edit the point was we had the option if we need or wanted to mix the lines up a bit. The final piece of ADR that needed doing was the ending line of the film "it's amazing what you can create with a little imagination". In all honesty once Stephanie got past the fact that she said it fairly fast originally, she was fine with the dubbing and picked it up quickly, I think it may have been because she was determined to get it done quickly as she hated looking at her performance in that scene, though she did an excellent job both in the original scene and in the dubbing. It is worth me just saying that the actors were a godsend on this and were great at dubbing considering we all had limited experience between us.
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