MoMI Tour (Blog #4) | Dubbing

On my tour of the MoMI, the demo that really stood out to me was the one about “dubbing”. 

Our tour guide brought us to a (little black-box of a) room that had been created within the maze of other film-related exhibitions, and had us all cram inside. The room itself had been sound-proofed with it’s walls covered in black foam. It had a shotgun mic hanging from the ceiling, pointing very specifically in the direction of the one little chair, sitting at the one little desk, with the one (not-so-little) computer and headset, in the room. He asked for a volunteer to come and “act” out the demo, so I raised my hand. 

I sat at the desk, and chose the “Babe” film clip to use for my dubbing example. The clip played through once, and then it replayed the first line that I was going to need to dub my voice over. It ran through this line, asking me to speak alongside the character, in order to practice syncing up my words exactly to the little pig’s lips. I did so. Then, it counted down from “3” so that I could say the line again (in the exact same way), and have my voice recorded for the dub. Then, it had me speak alongside the character doing the next line (to practice this line) and then it prompted me to re-state (and record) my version of this line. Three recorded lines later, the system then replayed the scene for us all, except with my voice in the place of the original actor’s voice. We all laughed at how differently my voice sounded from the original one, but yet, how perfectly it was able to be mixed into the film and the scene. It was pretty incredible. 

The aspects of “dubbing” that stood out to me the most were 1) The fact that dubbing can literally save a film. (I had never thought about this before, but if one comes off a day of shooting not having gotten a clear take on an important line (maybe it’s muffled, or it was ruined by a weird background noise) they will rent out a studio similar to the one we were in, and have the actor come in to “dub” over themselves.), 2) How hard getting a “good” dub is. (The lip syncing, the matching emotions to the footage, etc.), and 3) How tech-y it is! (I had never thought about the technology involved in the mixing of the dub and the original room-tone, to get this new audio to sound like it had been recorded in the original place!)

I suppose the change that dubbing has made to 'Moving Image Technology', is that it’s really left no excuse for a film to ever get away with having bad audio. In the “olden days”, maybe one could have blamed bad audio on the location, the time-constraints, the microphone, etc, and an audience might have felt sympathy for them and understood the “struggle” of making a good film. But now that there’s the possibility of dubbing to re-do any audio that wasn't covered perfectly in the first place, it leaves us with very little (to no) tolerance to sit through a film with audio issues of any kind.

And memorability-wise, I think “dubbing” stood out to me so much the other day, because was a very impressive and important aspect of filmmaking that I had absolutely never thought about before.