Wayne:

Hi, my name is Wayne Pashley.

I'm referred to as a sound designer, re-recording mixer, or supervising sound editor.

So, with the production dialogue, obviously, the key is to clean it up as best you can, from all the background noise that happens on location, and things that are completely out of your control.

Whether it's traffic or whether it's, you know, bad wind, and things like that. So, the idea is, is to get that production dialogue first of all, and try to clean it up with many tools that are available within sound editing platforms, whatever gear you're using.

So, it's really about cleaning up that dialogue, smoothing the dialogue, from one, from a close-up to a wide shot, to a mid-shot to a close-up, and to make it a seamless continuity.

And try your best with equalisation, and tools that enable you to clean up backgrounds, and things like that, to try to make it as clear, and clean, and not bumpy, basically.

You want a smooth ride.

So, again, it's a bit like we talked about, it's the surfing analogy. You want to keep it smooth, and creamy, and rolling.

You know, when you have to insert ADR, whether it's a story additive, it can be some people will cut as an over shoulder shot.

So, if you've got the over shoulder shot and you need to help tell the story, you can add a line that is not lip sync and say, "You put that phone down now. Put that phone down!" And then you can seamlessly integrate that line, so it's smooth and you have a continuity of performance.

So, you are now with dialogue editing, trying to integrate that new piece of dialogue that's recorded in the studio versus on location, and make it seamlessly fit.

That's what dialogue editing is. It's very, you have to have a lot of patience when you do it, but it's one of the most important jobs.

On the credits of a film, I will always credit the dialogue editor first because it is the most important.

Like I said, dialogue is king. and you're protecting the cast, you're protecting the script when you're doing dialogue editing. So, so important to get it cleaned, and that the audience aren't struggling with the story.

Some of the tools that are available, you can get high-end gear for cleaning up dialogue, which is expensive.

But you can also get some free, if not very inexpensive clean-up programmes, like for $40, there's this one out recently, but if you look it up, if you just put in Google, you know, audio clean-up software,

you'll see that there's some of these very simple to use programmes that will enable you to dial where you find that traffic, noise, and you can hit enter, and it will, it'll disappear.

And look at, obviously, it's working on frequencies. Sound is about frequencies, from high frequency to very low frequency.

And soon as you take out a frequency, it might be traffic sound, it's obviously going to affect the voice a bit.

Because within my voice, for example, I've got a quite a large range of low to high frequency. And if you are taking out traffic that might be just in the middle, obviously, I'm going to lose a bit as well.

But there are programmes out there that will help you clean up your dialogues for not that much money that you can use in either pro tools or offline with iMovie or Logic.

There's a whole bunch of programmes, whatever platform you're in, that you can clean up outside of the programme, and then import it back in.

Obviously, you want to try and do that stuff first before you have to set up a bedroom with, you know, blankets and things, and have to bring your cast member in and rerecord the dialogue, because obviously, for a student feature, that's always a bit of a big deal.

But if you can clean up that dialogue first with a very low budget, inexpensive programme, this probably will behove you to do that before doing the whole ADR thing as well.

What is ADR?

Now, ADR is a sort of a strange term, but it stands for automated dialogue replacement.

By the way, there's nothing automated about it.

ADR is where we bring the cast members back into a controlled environment. We bring them back into the studio if the dialogue that was recorded on the day of the shoot is damaged.

That's sort of the one of the top reasons you would do it.

So for example, if you're doing a movie based, as a period thing.

And it might be, you know, set in the 1100s or something like that. And all of a sudden, you're recording, and they're all made up, and dressed up, and you're recording your cast member, and a plane goes over.

Well, clearly, there is no planes 1,000 years ago.

So, what would happen in that situation is you would bring the cast member after you've edited the film.

You'd bring the cast member back into a studio, and they would see the movie, and they would see their performance, and recreate it.

So generally, the way I like to do ADR is sort of like as a musicality, like some people, they have this like beep, where they're beep, beep, and then they try to lip sync it. That's one way of doing it. It can be pretty tiresome.

What I tend to do now is have the cast member hear their performance. "Oh, I'm going to the shop" might be the line of dialogue. So, what I do is I play them the original, with the plane that's on top of it. I play them the original, and they'd gimme three, straight after it.

So you're looking for the rhythms, and the cadence, and the same performance, just repeat it, like music.

Then we get that, and we cut it in sync on our desired sound editing tool. That is one way to use ADR, which is kind of the most common.

It's to fix bad recorded dialogue that had happened on the day. It could be in a, you could have shot in a bathroom, you know, and the reverb of the bathroom is just bad, and you've lost all clarity of performance, and dialogue, sort of clarity. So that's one way, is to fix bad recordings.

Another thing with ADR though, is very important, is to think about if the scene is not working for whatever reason, between, cutting between your antagonist and your protagonist.

If you've got the dialogue happening and there's something wrong, sometimes ADR can be used, in fact, quite a lot, can be used to fix performance.

It's surprising how getting your cast member back into the room, same situation, looking at the whole scene, and seeing that they can actually do a different arc of the performance,

were either more subtle, or more out there, you know, to give it more energy, to give it more anger, to give it less anger.

Whatever you want to do, you can actually change the performance itself.

And therefore, over a given scene, give the cast member a chance to reshape their intent as a performance.