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
Sound in movies are built in layers/channels. So on location, you want to record the actor(s) as isolated as possible. But in most movies, there is plenty of scenes where they need to record the dialogue again in a studio because of noise or unwanted sounds. You more or less have the actors dubbing their own dialogue again.
So, in the studio, you build up the sound with background noise, dialogue, effects and so on and can therefore simply disable the layer/channel the “real” dialogue is in and record it in a different language.
An example is pretty much every club scene you ever watched, they are recorded without music to get the dialogue clear enough and add the music later.
>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
No, you just cut out the voice track and leave the environmental track intact. Then you put in a new voice track.
MOST of the environmental sound in most movies is in fact added in later by foley artists.
Not always the case for every movie or even every scene, but quite often it’s added later. Even background birds, traffic, etc. You try to isolate the actors. Sometimes you have to get them to dub their lines in the same language if there’s a noisy scene, or there’s something that couldn’t be cut around in editing.
The visual and audio streams are recorded simultaneously, but on different channels. A lot of the “ambient” sounds you hear are also added later.
You can also record music in different channels and mix them afterwards (that’s what happens with those “virtual choirs”).
The clapper board is used to align everything to the same starting point for each scene.
Generally, when a movie is being edited, the sound mixer will keep the dialogue separate from the other sound effects so that they can make a version of the movie without dialogue.
A lot of movies are dubbed over anyway in their naitive language. They film the scene and then many scenes are redubbed by the same actors for clearer audio. The way the audio track is put together, almost everything is modular, sound effects, music, dialog ect are created in post production and moved around as needed.
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