Suppose you’re shooting a movie. The actors do their work, and you also record their voices while they’re acting. Additional audio stuff like music and sound effects is added later.
But now suppose you want to dub the movie in another language. You can’t just slap music and stuff onto the project, but you (somehow) need to remove the voices of the original actors and then slap those of the new voice actors onto the film. Except if you cut that out, you’d also have to cut out all environmental noise, etc. And if you do that, you’d basically have to recreate every single sound required.
So how exactly does this work? Are movies shot with and without sound simultaneously? Or is there some technological means to separate the sound from the image?
In: Technology
I hosted a TV show in Germany that had a location shoot, and had global releases with dubbing over my voice in a dozen languages or so. I even overdubbed some of my own dialogue later in a studio.
One day on set I saw the soundman recording whilst everyone else was at lunch.
I asked him about it afterwards and he explained that he was recording the silence – the room tone – of the space we were recording in, because he’d be able to extrapolate information from that to mix overdubs correctly, etc. I have literally no knowledge about what he was doing beyond that very top level explanation, but it’s clear that the sound production even for my relatively simple TV series was more complicated than just taking the feed from my personal mic.
I am sure Hollywood films must do this and then some!
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