Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1335892
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 21 BY VICKIE SAMPSON MPSE These are real questions from editors and student editors. DEAR DIALOGUE DETECTIVE: As a dialogue editor, should I have a reel? If so, what would a dialogue reel be like? A before/after type of thing? DIALOGUE DETECTIVE: Good question! Unlike actors or directors who depend on visuals for their reels, sound is hard to judge without knowing what you had to deal with. Because good sound editing should sound seamless, sending a fi nished "reel" or fi le wouldn't give anyone any information about what it took to get it to that point. Since most of our jobs come from recommendations and referrals from people we've actually worked with, I'm not sure where you would send a "reel." Are sound companies requesting to hear your work? Is the request coming from a director, producer, or production company? If you really want to have something to show your editing skills, I would suggest creating a Pro Tools session that had both the raw OMF or AAF material in the lower tracks and then a fi nished edit session of what you've done in the upper tracks—like what you would turn over to a mixer. If you have access to the mixed stems, include those at the top of the session to show how the mixers were able to mix your material. Nothing says you can do impressive or good work better than seeing your edit session. Again, though, a referral or recommendation from someone known and trusted has a lot more weight than fi nished sound fi les. Some companies that are looking for editors may give you a few minutes to edit as a "trial." Just make sure that they are not abusing you by using what you edited for their mix without paying you. This is why it's good to align yourself with mixers you have worked with because they know if your work is "mixable." I would take the recommendation of a mixer if I'm looking to hire an editor. Mixers can see your edits in your session. That is why you should NEVER consolidate your tracks. Seeing where edits are and being able to access them (pull out handles, for example) is a time saver for mixers. If you consolidate (make all the edits into one region), it ties the mixer's hands and they won't be able to make any edits. NEVER consolidate your edits! DEAR DIALOGUE DETECTIVE: Besides getting into the technicals, what have you found to be your biggest success and what were some of your struggles as a dialogue editor? DIALOGUE DETECTIVE: I think my biggest success has been to "salvage" production dialogue without having to ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement or "looping") to fi x problems. During an ADR session, an actor comes to an ADR recording room or booth and re-records lines of dialogue that either have too much noise to be understood easily, or voice-over/ narration or added lines of new dialogue. These lines have to be programmed by the ADR editor or supervisor to the exact start of a line of dialogue. One line at a time. An actor can do about 10 lines of ADR an hour. Films with a lot of visual effects usually have a lot of ADR due to the wind/rain machines that have to create those effects on the set. Animation is ALL ADR. There is no production sound in animated fi lms. Film editors, directors, and actors usually always prefer the original production takes because that's where the performances are and that's what they chose to be in their movie. Even when we record ADR, which we usually do before we can tackle fi xing the production sound, I would guess we probably end up using the production dialogue about 75% of the time. Unless, of course, there are major sound issues and ADR is a necessity. On the other hand, one of my successes was doing 100% ADR on the bus scenes in Speed, the 1994 release with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. This was before digital editing so the ADR had to be shot very carefully and sync had to be pretty close to perfect. There was no time expansion/ compression. The director, Jan de Bont, had been a DP (director of photography) and this was his fi rst feature as a director so sound didn't mean so much to him. He wanted to shoot those scenes on a moving bus as opposed to the bus being towed by a camera rig. He wanted the energy on the actors' faces. He was told that everything would have to be replaced in ADR and he said, "Okay," not really knowing all that that entailed. The premise of those scenes on the bus was that the bus had to stay above 60 mph or it would blow up. The actual bus was only going from fi rst gear to second gear—hardly the 60 mph it needed to support the premise of the story. There was a lot of engine noise and the cyclical sound of ramping up to second gear which made understanding the dialogue a big problem. When I play the "before" (original production sound) and "after" (the fi nished, mixed fi lm) scenes to my students, I often wonder, if we had the tools in Pro Tools that we have today (de-noise, de-hum, etc.), could we have salvaged the production? The other factor involved was that this was Keanu's fi rst role after Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and recording his ADR gave him a chance to make himself sound more authoritative and "manly." The fi lm won an Academy Award for sound and I was very proud to have contributed to that. One of the greatest DEAR DIALOGUE DETECTIVE