ADR & Foley: the goal is seamless sound

Post,  June, 2005  by David John Farinella

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"Then I did this Diet Pepsi spot where the cans in the refrigerator are dancing to the Ramones' 'Blitzkrieg Bop,'" he continues. "There were different kinds of cans, a whole lot of cans and bottles, and it was done on certain kinds of surfaces. There were shots where they were throwing a can from one place to another and it would land on the floor. It is a craft and an art in itself. Those guys [at C5] are really talented, and I respect their craft big time. We tried to keep it as realistic as possible to what the cans would sound like. I did these three spots for Dasani that was basically these people dressed up like animals: a bear in the woods, a mouse in a training box and a dog walking through the kitchen that was all Foley in terms of footsteps."

Grupp gets the Pro Tools sessions via FTP from C5 and then edits them on a Pro Tools system. He's not sure why spots are so Foley heavy these days. "It might just be the spots that I'm getting. There might be a lot of guys who work at editorial companies who don't know what Foley means, but because I've been in the business a long time and I'm a sound editor, I know when I can fake something and when I can't. It's something you learn through experience, and I try to incorporate all different kinds of sound assets in a sound job and Foley is just one. Also, for those pictures there is no production sound so I'm trying to simulate those scenes as best I can."

ADR OPTIONS

"The challenge these days isn't much different than what it was many years ago, the only difference is now we're offered more possibilities," explains Brian Slack VP/director of technology at Los Angeles-based Widget Post (www.widgetpost.com). "So the challenge now comes on the mixing stage. One of the drawbacks of recording ADR in the past was the recording medium. Obviously if you only had 24 tracks to deal with and you were doing a fairly large scene, you were only able to do a few takes. Now the director is trying to get a performance for something very specific, especially from an actor who isn't very comfortable or is not familiar with the process. It's not uncommon to do 10 or 15 or 20 takes of a particular line, depending on what's happening. Doing that for three or four characters at a time just wasn't possible 10 years ago, whereas now it's very possible and we're given the ability to do multiple recordings of each take."

One of the common practices at Widget, says Slack, is recording a boom mic, a close mic and a lavalier all at the same time. "With production recording technologies as they are now, it is not uncommon to have four, six, eight channels on set, so every character might have their own lavalier as well as their own boom, and there might be a room mic as well. There might be a mix down of the whole thing all on the set and depending on how the editor decided to cut the scene, he may have used the lavalier for a whole scene or just the boom for the whole scene. A lot of times you're not sure how those decisions were made when you're in the middle of the ADR process, so the only way to go about it properly is to record them all."