if you could ADR everything, would you?

[Marc Wielage]

Throwing in one idea that came up when I was watching an interview with Mike Matzdorff about making Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. Because they were very determined to get good sound - and they often shot multiple cameras - it often happened that a boom would slip into one of the shots. After thinking about how to deal with it, they proactively decided not to dump those takes but rather made the somewhat unconventional decision that removing the boom from the shots in post was easy enough to do, so they would simply move on once they had an otherwise good take. In fact, they often made sure the boom op moved in closer to optimize sound without worrying about the boom in the shot. Not a solution for all situations but can work sometimes.

Yes, that's an excellent trick done in House of Cards. But in many other shows, the standard deal is to just wire up every speaking actor. That's not ideal, plus it presents new problems (like clothing noise and the potential for interference), but it can work very well.

Another very standard deal is to shoot the wide shots and only get the boom mic in as close as reasonably possible, but use only the boom sound from medium shots and close-ups where the mic was in an optimal position. Mixing and matching dialogue from different takes is an art unto itself.

And I agree with Hugh's comments above. Choice of specific microphone types also affects sound quality, and some mics work great outdoors and lousy indoors, and vice-versa.

 

[Nathan Wold]

Fellini ADR'd almost all of 8 1/2...the ADR audio doesn't even match what the actors were saying on set because they hadn't even finished a script when they shot it!

Sure it looked a bit ridiculous but it's still one of the best films ever made.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Fellini ADR'd almost all of 8 1/2...the ADR audio doesn't even match what the actors were saying on set because they hadn't even finished a script when they shot it! Sure it looked a bit ridiculous but it's still one of the best films ever made.

There are things that can be forgiven in a classic 1963 Italian art film that will not work for a 2016 commercial indie film. Badly-recorded dialogue is one of them. Go find me a contemporary indie film or even a contemporary Hollywood film where 100% of the production was ADR'd. It's just not done, for all the reasons I said before.

BTW, I actually mastered 8-1/2 for the distributor in the early 1990s, and I thought the sync was absolutely atrocious throughout. It's very distracting to watch foreign films of that period, particularly when everything is badly dubbed and the foley is way off. There's an art to really getting details like that right, and the moment the technical flaws get in the way of the story, the quality of the film suffers as a result.

 

[Craig Parkes]

There are things that can be forgiven in a classic 1963 Italian art film that will not work for a 2016 commercial indie film. Badly-recorded dialogue is one of them. Go find me a contemporary indie film or even a contemporary Hollywood film where 100% of the production was ADR'd. It's just not done, for all the reasons I said before.

While not 100%, there have been a number of modern films that have had a surprising amount of ADR (The original Lord of the Rings trilogy is a good example due to the then lack of proper sound stage in Wellington).

 

[Marc Wielage]

While not 100%, there have been a number of modern films that have had a surprising amount of ADR (The original Lord of the Rings trilogy is a good example due to the then lack of proper sound stage in Wellington).

And just to flip to the other side of the argument, I just saw X-Men: Apocalypse last night, and was struck by how about 90% of the film looked ADR'd to me. But again, this is a $180 million Hollywood studio film that took 3 years to make, which is far beyond the wherewithal of most people here. And even with X-Men, some of the dialogue seemed very phony and hollow to me. What was odd was that even some of the studio set scenes had obviously-looped dialogue. There are definitely directors who choose to go with ADR for deliberate creative reasons, and they can do that provided they have lots of time, money, and experience to do so. I still don't think it's ideal, because it puts one more layer of "unreality" between the film and the viewer.

The good news is that the film was shot on Red Epic Dragon with Zeiss lenses and looked spectacular; the DP was Newton Thomas Sigel and the colorist was Stephen Nakamura and his crew at CO3/Santa Monica.

 

[Zakaree Sandberg]

my old short Abaddon was all adr..

I didnt have a budget to get sound on set (loud honda 3000) no sound guy..

so I just decided to do it all in post (I have my own recording studio, so tracked vocals with my U87 and the car stuff I did in my driveway)

I actually enjoyed the process, however I could not see this really viable for longer projects with real pages of dialogue..

(most is just foley.. but the actor did have to say a couple things)


https://vimeo.com/147980059