Sound Department Responsibilities - Whose Fault Is It Anyway?

[davefisk]

It's the director's fault.

A similar problem happened in the UK last year with "Jamaica Inn" - the dialogue was mumbled with a Cornish accent and the BBC got thousands of complaints.

The sound recordist at the time had flagged this up with the director and was overridden.

A sound recordist cannot compensate for poor acting ability.

The problem is that the director has the script and knows what the actor is saying, forgetting that the audience will have no script and has to rely solely on the spoken word.

Definitely a production fault and not in any way down to the sound recordist.

Absolutely 100% in agreement, especially with the script part. I've had this exact thing happen to be when I used to edit video game dialogue. A particular talent was reading through a line really fast, and since I had the script I understood it. Someone happened to walk into my edit room while I was working on a line and they said "what the hell are they saying. It's too fast and I can't understand it". So I ditched the script and just listened to the audio, and sure enough, as clean as the audio was, I still couldn't understand half of it because the talent just spoke way too fast, and it wasn't caught until the edit after the talent was gone. They had to call them in and re-record everything.

 

[OldCorpse]

Yep, that's the Known Expectations Trap I spoke about in an earlier post in this thread - and this trap appears in many aspects of filmmaking, not just sound/dialogue recording. Really important thing to be aware of.

 

[Josh Bass]

ive experienced the opposite...working on a project (usually my own!), already knowing script/dialogue and always fearing people arent speaking clearly enough. does this mean i am super amazing or merely just awesome?

 

[OldCorpse]

ive experienced the opposite...working on a project (usually my own!), already knowing script/dialogue and always fearing people arent speaking clearly enough. does this mean i am super amazing or merely just awesome?

I'll let you in on a secret: great artists are distinguished by their judgment. A skilled craftsman can learn the craft - obviously. For example, s/he'll become aware of things to watch out for, pitfalls and traps - one example of which we are discussing. Once they've learned most pitfalls and traps, they become a highly skilled craftsman. That's why people pay for the services of highly skilled craftsmen - because such craftsmen have seen it all through experience. But now you're asking a different question: how to judge outcome, not just how to avoid pitfalls. That's a different question that goes to the heart of what it means to be a successful artist. A successful artist can work long and hard on something, yet when s/he performs it, it seems very natural and unlabored and casual - that's talent. Most people lose objectivity when they've been working on something, especially if they've been doing something for awhile. That's why they often need input from others - "hey, I've worked on this screenplay for 2 years, I can no longer tell what works and what doesn't, I can't separate myself, I can't be objective, give me an outsider's view/feedback" - "is this dialogue clearly understood, or not, I can no longer tell!". That's the whole meaning of the famous phrase "You Are Too Close To The Material" - it means you can no longer tell, objectively what impact it will have on an uninitiated audience. In your example, you can no longer tell if the dialogue is clear enough or if you are being paranoid. The great artist is resistant against this effect - they have an internal watch, a musician's equivalent to "perfect pitch", where they can tell the pitch of a note objectively in the middle of a song or isolated from everything. Most of us can't. And most of us are not great artists. That's why we have the work-around of submitting our work for evaluation by trusted readers/listeners/viewers - to correct for our lack of "perfect pitch". A great artist doesn't need to do that, they are always able to separate the reaction of the audience from their own clouded judgment.

Unfortunately, many people are not only not great artists, they're not even skilled craftsmen, which is why they'll fall into traps like the one we've been discussing. And then you can't hear what your lead actor is saying in the dialogue and the critic calls for the head of the poor sound person.