ADR first go

Well that was fun. And it worked better than we had thought. The trio Stephen Ashley and David met with Tony our Doctor last evening (26th March) and started on our epic quest to do the ADR for Devious.

Above you can see Tony in his custom-made soundbooth reading from the newly transcribed script whilst keeping "a weather eye" on the action displayed on a monitor in front of him. His headphones played back each segment repeatedly whilst he refined the sentence in question.

Generally we managed to accept a take after five or so. It takes a short while to get into the swing of it and recreate the acting performance and try to match the mouth moves of the original footage. Not particularly easy at all - in fact when Ashley and Stephen (on the adjoining pc) were passing each take thinking it was just right, David in the adjoining room was finding he still had issues in trying to match the vocals with the footage.

 An iterative process we think we can only get better with this. When you are concentrating on looking for exact matching of mouth to sound you tend to think it's not working as well as you want. But when we assembled to watch a scene that David had worked on from matching the new takes we were astonished by the results. We managed to rescue a scene that was so badly marred by traffic noise into something which has real potential. The was the scene where the Doctor, Bradley and Phillip had reached a dome which turns out to be part of the dalek complex.

 Here we see David in the next room working on the takes Ashley and Stephen were preparing elsewhere on the network. We thought it best to work like this so the takes could be checked and retaken if necessary. We've yet to refine this process, so next time in a week or two we'll have the technique a little better...

More soon!