Automated Dialog Replacement: Beguilement

This is a screenshot from an dialog replacement project I had the opportunity to work on. It is a short film series called Beguilement. The entire 4 episode series need audio work and there were a number of people working on the project. I chose to do the dialog replacement for the 1st episode. I did the recording of the voices and the editing.

The recording process was easy. The original actors were happy to come in and redo just their voices. The actors were really easy to work with and made the process really easy. Most of the lines were only two people and we had to schedule 2 four hour days to get all their lines done for each of them. But because we took time to get some good recordings, we had different clips to choose from and use the one that sounded best.

The editing process was a little harder. Throughout the film there are a couple scene changes that meant we had to use different processing effects to get the sound of the room they were in. These scenes didn't have too much dialog however so it wasn't too much of a hassle to do.

The real challenge came when half way through the film, the voices sounded different than in the first half. I realized that this was because the lines in the second half of the film were done on a different day than the first half. This made it so that the EQs and reverbs used in the first half of the film made the voices in the second half sound completely different even if they were in the same room. Because of this, I had to use a different EQ to make the voices match the beginning of the film. After finding a correct sound for the voices, I used a different reverb to match the reverb used at the beginning.

This took a couple of tries and I had to use different speakers and rooms to listen and hear if they sounded similar enough. I ended finding something that worked and used that. Overall, the project was a great way to get some experience on editing voices and seeing the problems that can occur during this type of work.