Audio Post: ADR

Did you know that most of the dialog that you hear in a movie was not recorded at the time when the scene was actually being shot? A lot of the actors' lines were rerecorded in a studio in order to get better sound quality, or sometimes a better performance. This process is called Automatic Dialog Replacement, or ADR. The trick is for the actor to be able to recreate the emotion from the scene and make it sound as natural as possible. Here is a clip showing the ADR process on the film "King Kong".



Real ADR is done through a process called looping, where a short scene is played over and over and the actor performs his/her lines repeatedly until he/she gets them just right. It is the mixing engineer's responsibility to make the recording sound as believable as possible in the scene. This is done by making decisions in the recording process (microphone placement) and in the mix afterwards (using reverb and other FX to make it sound like the character is in the actual setting on screen).

We are going to get into more professional looping later, but for today, I just want you to practice doing your own basic ADR. Please do the following:

1. Go into the Media Share and check out all the different movie clips that I have picked out for you. (Media Share>Class Materials>Movie trailers). Pay special attention to the dialog and the music being used.
   
2. Pick one you want to work with and copy it to your folder on your computer.
3. Start a new Pro Tools session and call it your name_trailerADR.
4. Import your movie clip.

Now do one of the following:

• Get a microphone and begin recording all the lines in the film. You should not be personally doing all the ADR! Get your classmates to play different characters and record them. We will be trading the mics every 45 minutes, so try to work quickly!
  
• In Reason, make 2 different beats that are each 30 sec.-1 min. in length. You are going to use these as the music bed for your clip, so make sure they match the emotion of the scene. Export your beats as audio files and import them into your Pro Tools session.
• Find and place FX for the most important actions on screen (explosions, etc.)