MOMI Visit: Blog #4

Not Pictured: Me

The audio demonstrations section at MOMI stood out the most to me. My group participated in one demo while another one stood out, but there wasn’t time to participate in it.The first demo was the ADR Room where you can dub dialogue for different movies like Coming To America, Babe and School of Rock. The first one we only saw from the outside window, but Babe and School of Rock was done by two members of the group. The first step was School of Rock with the first step was to watch the scene with caption. Then it was to practice the line as the scene was playing out. Final step was to say the lines with the scene and that is what would be used in the recording. I wondered how well it would sync because during the second step it didn’t sound like it matched up. When the program played the ADR over the scene, it matched up almost perfectly, like Jack Black really sounded like a young woman.

The next student did Babe and that also matched well. That was aided by the fact the film was made to be ADR since it used speaking animals. What I learned by this process was how accurate the dub can be. During lecture, there was a demonstration video shown about the ADR process with the fast food workers needing to be dubbed by new actors. The process looks very precise now. The other demonstration that I witnessed, but didn’t participate in was the Movie Score section. Remove the score from a film and add a new score. The tone can change dramatically such as when the music from a scene from Independence Day was removed in favor of a more hopeful sounding John Williams like score. It might have been John Williams, but I didn’t see the screen. It made it look like the arrival of alien spaceships is awe inspiring instead of something to dread.