For many years, record producers and engineers have spliced together the best takes of pop vocals and orchestral performances to create the version that is finally released to the public on disc or download. I don't know why it never occurred to me that sound editors for movies wouldn't do the same thing with dialog, but I hadn't thought about it until I watched the extras DVD for "The Social Network" the other night.
Obviously, various takes of performances are cut together in editing, and the dialog is often looped in post-production for any number of reasons -- to smooth over the differences between takes, to change line readings, or simply to compensate for inadequate sound quality from the original recording. But the David Fincher editing team of Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall (recent Oscar-winners) and sound designer Ren Klyce (my new movie hero, alongside Skip Lievsay).
First of all, the editors get a lot of material to work with. But let's clear up the whole "99 takes" thing. It's not what it may sound like. Fincher did 99 takes during the shooting of the opening scene, for example -- but he didn't simply make the actors do the same thing 99 times in a row. As Wall and Baxter told Vanity Fair:
recent comments