Dialog Recording

So it is four in the morning and I am starting a 72 hour work-o-thon to finish my animatic, because I am a masochist. All film makers need to be.

I am going through the dialog from my recording session and picking takes. Some engineers stop recording in between each take, but I don't like that. I like to keep recording until the line is perfect and we move on to the next one. That way while listening to the takes you can hear yourself giving direction and rate how you did.

Between every take you'll be saying "slow down", or "put a pause here", or "try emphasizing this". It is a really incremental and intricate process of shaping the dialogue until it's perfect. If you are an animator, you are already meticulously shaping the backgrounds and the character movement, so why not the dialogue?

In live action film you have so much to shape. You need to watch the movements of the actors, their faces, props, lighting, everything happens simultaneously. With so many things going at once, the little nuances in the dialogue, the emphasis or the cadence, sometimes get's lost. Animation is great because you can do all that later (or earlier if you so prefer) and have time to separate the dialogue, shape it, then shape movement, then lighting, etc.

Well, I've got a good three hours of audio to go through. See you on the other side.