Recording a Voice from the Distance

[Marc Wielage]

Another approach, which I've seen David Lynch do, is just bring the remote sound cart (he uses a table) right into the on scene location and do an ADR type recording session with a shotgun mic right at the same spot the shot was done (with all the camera's turned off and the sound guy just sitting at a table 15 feet from the actor...

Yes, Wild Lines and "alts" have been done for a long, long time, many decades, even before David Lynch. It never hurts to get a clean pass of dialogue with no movement and no cameras rolling, kind of like recording a radio show. That way, there's no clothing noise or footsteps or overlapping dialogue, and the dialogue editor can mix and match and use whatever works best.

But ADR is pretty inevitable for many projects. People get freaked out about it, but it's actually not as complicated as you might think. One key to ADR is to use the same microphone as what was used on location, plus get a good re-recording mixer who can process the sound to make it sound reasonably close to the way it sounded during production. There are some interesting Impulse Reverb programs out there that can mimic the acoustics of rooms, so your ADR could sound like a guy in a forest, or a guy in a tiled bathroom, or a guy in a massive cathedral.