Keeping You In The Loop

First of all, a pic from several weeks ago:


This is from mid February. I snapped it during my ADR session for Lie To Me. ADR, or "looping" is when you go into a sound studio after something has been shot and re-record certain dialogue. It is usually done for one of two reasons: either because a line didn't come out clean (like, a plane passed during that moment, or another actor cut into the line), or because a line has been changed (to further explain the plot, or sometimes even to change it).

In this case, it was for clarification. My scene opened with a pan shot that, on its way to picking me up, passes over a waiter being interrogated in the corner of the kitchen. The director was afraid the audience would think the waiter was the one speaking. So to my original line ("If you're not part of the families, we can't give you the tapes"), they added the following for the sake of clarity: "We're professional videographers. We have rules. So....."

I guess the idea was that with the added line, the audience would realize that the waiter isn't a professional videographer! Brilliant!

ADR is nicknamed "looping" by everyone in the biz because in Ye Olde Days, the way they did it was to have an actor listen to and watch a "loop" of the same film clip over and over and over; after hearing it many times the performer was able to easily sync up with the soundtrack on the next "loop" and thus match his/her lips moving onscreen.

I've done a fair amount of looping on past shows and I feel like I'm pretty good at it. I've found that it's less about matching the lips perfectly (which comes with repetition) and more about matching the intention and intensity of the original scene.

In the case of this shot, there was no lip-sync to worry about: because my entire first line occurs during the pan, I wasn't even on camera until the very tail end.

A good production company will always get "room tone" at a location before they leave it. That's about a minute of recorded "nothingness" on the set/location that actually isn't nothing; it's whatever ambient noise exists that day: air conditioners, rain, even the hum of fluorescent lights. No matter how controlled your set is, there's always a little room tone to pick up. Later, if a scene has to be looped, they can mix the "room tone" under the new dialogue and make it sound more real.

Of course, there are varying degrees of success (or failure) at getting ADR to meld seamlessly into your final product. And as a viewer, once you're aware of looping, it jumps out at you all the time. Either because the room tone doesn't match well, or because even though someone's back is to camera, you can tell their cheeks aren't moving in sync with the dialogue (as was the case with me on Law and Order: Trial By Jury a few years back....but there was nothing I could do, because they were adding an entirely new line, so the synch would never have been right).

So now when we're watching TV, I'll often mutter "looping" when I see it.... much to Jody's chagrin.