THE ADR SESSIONS

This entry was posted on 10/19/2007 2:31 PM and is filed under Post Production.

Most of the blockbuster movies you've ever seen have had the dialogue replaced with re-recorded audio, done in the perfect conditions of a recording studio. Since Tucson has a train blowing through town every ten minutes and enough military air traffic to kill the illusion of a dead city, we shot the whole movie with just the camera microphone as a reference for the actors to match-sync their studio work to their original performances. That's called Automatic Dialogue Replacement, or ADR. But there's nothing automatic about it, it's all manual, that's why I call it "MDR".

The huge benefit of going through all of the trouble to ADR a movie is it produces the kind of results you're used to hearing when you watch a big-budget film. Because foreign sales are a big factor in our marketing, we also needed to separate the character voices from the music and sound effects tracks. Having each character voice a seperate audio track also allows us to perfectly mix the entire sound production. The entire movie from beginning to end has been re-recorded, which means every time someone's mouth opens, the dialogue has been replaced with pristine audio. It's an expensive but necessary step required to building a top quality product.

This meant calling the actors back to do the re-recording at Mi Casa Studios in Tucson, owned and operated by Ismael Barajas, who has been in the recording industry his whole life with a platinum and gold record to his credit. The studio was just remodeled and expanded with all new equipment so we had to configure the music recording system to do ADR for movies. With just a week of recording time booked, we couldn't possibly get everyone into the recording studio and expect to finish replacing dialogue for an entire feature, so we called in an expert.

We flew in Kevin Lucero Less from Chicago to help get us through this monumental task on time. He's an absolutely brilliant actor with a wide variety of performing disciplines under his command. We made full use of Lucero's talents, having him do the voices for everyone we couldn't possibly get into the studio in the short time we had. Hearing him perfectly match not only the sync but the exact voice of the baseball coach in the beginning of the movie was our introduction to Lucero's amazing talents. He also directed actors into the "diseased" voice, training them on every nuance of their performances, which made my life a lot easier running on no sleep.

The star of the movie, Santiago Craig who plays THE LAST MAN, walked in and banged his way through ADR for the entire movie, including all of the narration in just two days. That must be some kind of record. It was exhausting but he got it all done, perfectly. That was a very impressive performance. Every one of our actors nailed their performances with speed and precision, making the ADR sessions a high energy and fascinating experience that kept me wide awake the whole time, even without a single night of real sleep that week.

I wrote the narration for the entire movie between sessions with writers block and an awful case of sleep deprivation, obviously that's not the perfect time to do your best work on the most important part of the movie, right? I'm so used to sleep deprivation that my first draft that we recorded, never needed to be edited and re-recorded. I guess you know you're good at something when you can do some of your best work in your most depleted mental and physical condition. That's what it takes to make a good movie, working till you drop but not sitting down because you have another 36 hours to go before the next opportunity to catch a two hour nap anywhere you can.

Below are photos from the ADR sessions:

After recording all of this ADR, it wasn't over yet, I spent another week of round-the-clock effort to edit and sync all of the re-recorded dialogue into the movie timeline. Now we've got that A-list picture dialogue that delivers a full, rich feature film experience for the audience. It's obvious that this movie will be someone's all-time favorite last man on earth genre movie, that's why we all went through this whole mountain of work to make the best motion picture possible.

10/26/2007 1:36 PM Robert wrote:
I love Theresa's (Eva character) mutant voice, it's awesome! She is great in this film.
Looks like it was tough re-recording all those other vocals too.
This is all shaping up nicely.

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