Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538091
20 FA L L 2 0 2 5 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y we should use. It's really fascinating just to share ideas with everybody openly to improve. I have more than 25 years of experience mixing, which includes a lot of ADR experience over the years, so it's not that I didn't know what I was doing, but localization was a completely eye- opening process and flow. There is a lot of competition in the localization world and, sure, there are some things we don't share, but it's just a great community of folks. And not just mixers, it's the editors, recordists, production sound mixers, designers, effects editors, Foley artists, etc. What are some challenges when it comes to perspective with dubbed audio? The biggest challenge is the efforts and breaths that actors do in the booth that you have to tame down. You listen to production, and they are pretty subtle unless it's for effect or unless the breath is part of an emotion or something big that's important to the story. But just standard breaths and efforts and lip smacks or things of that nature, they always seem to be far louder than I would ever want them in the mix. So, there is a lot of clip gain used just to tame that stuff down. It can become challenging if all the actors are doing it in the entire show and you have to take care of these efforts and breaths and transients that are 10 dB louder than where they should be. That said, it isn't as prevalent as it used to be. I think people are really dialed in to getting emotion and delivery right these days. But years ago, there'd be somebody whispering in the original, but our dub doesn't have it quite right as they're just speaking in a normal, medium tone. The world of dub is so interesting because if you're watching a first-run show and you see somebody do, say, a lip smack movement and there's nothing there, it's totally okay. But when you watch a dub, if you see something like that, you have to add it. You get away with a lot less when it comes to dubbing. What advice do you have for other mixers in helping with perspective in dubbing? I just go back to the streaming channels and watch the end product, something I've mixed that's been released. I want to listen to it and see how it plays. I test my family on it without saying anything. I let the trailer play in the background and I had one comment from my wife recently going, "Gosh, I didn't even know that that was a Danish show." So, yeah, listen to the end product and then learn from that. Then try other techniques to improve on the next one. Also, listen to it on other platforms. I feel like there's always more to learn. That's one thing I love about this industry in particular; you never stop learning. There's always new technology. There's always new advancements and new workflows to compensate for the new technology. And so, you're always keeping up with that. Do you have a project or two that would provide a good presentation of the work you do? There's a short, limited series that is originally in Danish called Secrets We Keep. The other one I want to mention since I'm kind of a train nut is a recent feature called Bullet Train Explosion out of Japan. That one was also well received, and I had a ton of fun doing the mix. It required a lot of perspective work because you have all these people in a tube and I had to not make them all feel flat on the screen. You had to pull them off the screen, set them deeper in the scene, everybody's talking. It's a typical action movie but had a lot of real challenges but was really fun. The way we think about dialogue and how it is used in film and television is always evolving. Filmmakers are becoming more and more creative with storytelling as the advancement of technology grows and the tools to be able to be more creative with dialogue improve. Mark and Paul are just two of the many talented re-recording mixers and ADR mixers that are constantly upping the level of quality in their respective field. With English dubbing, especially live-action content being fairly new, consumers are exposed to so much more content than they ever have been. Those of us who live in primarily English-speaking regions are used to content that is already in English. Watching content that doesn't necessarily match lip flap can be very jarring, which is why making the mixes and performances as spot on as can be is so important. In the world of first-run content, ADR is sometimes key for making or breaking a scene, whether it is for changing a performance, adding important dialogue for story point, or adding filler dialogue to help carry a scene along more smoothly. Not only are you trying to match the production dialogue as best you can tonally, but also technically within the same space so it can sound as seamless as possible. It's pretty incredible to think about how far we have come in the process of dialogue, both in mixing and recording, and exciting to think where we can continue to grow in the world of dialogue.