Adventures in ADR

Often when making a film, you reach a point in your editing process where you realise that some fixing needs to be done. Sometimes that fixing relates directly to the image, and other times it is the sound. You then have several options: re-shoots (which can be costly and impractical), manipulation in the computer, or, for sound, you can do ADR.

What is ADR?

Professional ADR. 

ADR stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement, otherwise known as looping, dubbing or post-sync. Basically, if you have scenes in your film with dialogue where the audio track is problematic in some way (bad audio recording, sound interference of some kind, etc.), then you can record a new dialogue track and use that cleaner sound instead. However, this gets a little tricky - you need to make sure that the new dialogue matches the actors’ original dialogue, and is perfectly in sync. Otherwise, it just looks weird.

Of course, since ADR is used all the time for films and television shows, there are well-established ways of doing this with little trouble. We learned about the ADR rooms at Sharpe Sound on my class’ visit there last week, and from my work as a PA on Supernatural I know that they have an ADR trailer on set often to do ADR as needed. Some film schools even have ADR studios for students to use (I believe Vancouver Film School is one of these). 

In the case of the film I am working on with two co-writers/directors/producers for SFU (Mistaken Indemnity), we did not have access to a nice ADR studio at the school. We didn’t think this would be too much of a problem - how hard could ADR really be? We knew it might be a small challenge, but we’d triumphed over much larger ones (weather, for one) and this was just another aspect of filmmaking we had to tackle.

Our film required ADR for one scene in particular, and a number of smaller bits throughout which were not as important. The major ADR scene was at the half-way point in our short film: an outdoor scene, where we had put Lavalier (lav) mics on our actors as they walked down a street (very wide shot). Unfortunately, the lavs picked up a lot of clothing noise, and the dialogue was muffled to the point of near incoherence. We knew right away that scene needed to be fixed, and instead of re-shooting it, we decided to try some ADR.

Without any of the proper set up or equipment, and with only a boom mic and a projector in a small sound-proof room at SFU Woodwards, we called in our actors and began recording ADR. We tried a few different ways:

1. We projected the film on a screen so our actors could hear the lines and see their actions; after playing it through a number of times, we then turned off the sound and recorded our actors saying their lines in sync with the picture. This had some success, but was also slightly problematic and I suspect the image became a bit of a distraction for our actors as they focused more on trying to speak in sync instead of focusing on the lines themselves.
2. Next we tried having our actors say their lines without the image, after having watched it several times to get the “feel” of the scene first. We had no way of really knowing if the lines would sync properly, but this technique often resulted in a stronger performance from our actors (probably because the distraction of trying to sync to the image was gone). 

Both techniques had mostly positive results, and by the end of the session we figured we had enough audio to play around with in editing to make the scene work. Our actors were great and patient through the entire process, and quite determined for the dialogue to sound perfect, which I truly appreciated. It is worth noting that they’ve been fantastic for us right from the beginning of production, and I hope they’ll be interested in working with us again next year!

With the new sound in hand, we locked ourselves away in one of the editing rooms and set to work syncing the ADR. 

Scene needing ADR from Mistaken Indemnity.

This was quite difficult.

Syncing sound for the scenes originally was much easier, since we had a slate to follow and it was quite straight forward. This time, we had no guide for the sound, and spent hours nudging sound files along the timeline until we were satisfied with the sync. 

Of course, that was once we’d found a version of the dialogue that matched the original.

We had our actors say the lines many times to give us options for syncing, which worked out well. Some of the new lines were very close to the original, but certain words were off by a beat or two; other lines just didn’t match up at all. Then we would find the lines that were perfect - we dropped them on the timeline, nudged them into place, and when we played the scene with the new dialogue, it looked natural, and it was hard to tell that it had been ADR at all. Occasionally it happened that we would choose a piece of ADR, drag it on to the timeline of the project and it would miraculously be lined up exactly correctly on the first try; we loved when that happened, since we then didn’t need to fuss over it anymore. 

In the end, we had what we needed. The outdoor scene had been ADR’d accurately, and the other random little parts that had required ADR were fixed as well. We screened the edits for our class yesterday and only one or two people noticed the ADR - when we asked the class which parts they had thought were ADR’d, some suggested other scenes which hadn’t been ADR’d at all (likely because we do still have some audio level issues to fix for some shots... we’re working on that). 

All considered, I’d say our “making it up as we go” ADR session was a success! It just goes to show what can be accomplished in film with basic equipment and a tiny budget.