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This is a comments thread about Blog Post: Film Score Friday 2/1/19 by Scott Bettencourt |
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I think Stanely Donen looped most his films (see Bedazzled, for example) and it always had a distancing effect. Then again, since the majority of box office these days comes from foreign markets (where everything is looped) I sometimes wonder why filmmakers bother live-recording anything. But if you're gonna loop a film, why not put more effort into it? Animated films, it seems to me, consistently suffer from a distancing effect (partly because the voices are provided by name actors not used to trade nuances, RIP Mel Blanc). If two animated characters are talking in a car, why not record them in an enclosed space? If people are talking outside, why not record them outside?
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At least in live-action movies, these days it seems like much more effort (probably due to improved recording technologies) is made to give looped dialogue the proper ambience. Despite this, there were three movies late last year in which it sounded like the actor had re-voiced nearly their entire performance -- Nicole Kidman in Destroyer, Will Farrell in Holmes & Watson, and KiKi Layne in If Beale Street Could Talk. For a while, I've wondered if one of the reasons To Catch a Thief is one of my less favorite Hitchcock films -- despite the spectacular lead actors - is that so many of the scenes feel dead due to the re-voicing of the French actors. Pauline Kael used to complain about all the looping in John Boorman films, particularly Zardoz, that the re-recording drained all the spontaneity from the scenes. I've often felt specific actors weren't very good at looping -- Roy Scheider tended to give his looped lines more arch readings, while Sigourney Weaver's loopings were flatter. One thing that intrigues me about Peter Jackson's 3D/colorized WWI doc They Shall Not Grow Old is the looping and otherwise added sound for all the silent vintage footage (I haven't seen it yet, still not sure if I"ll catch it).
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I'm sacrilegious enough to say I was a little disappointed with They Shall Not Grow Old. I think colorization has still got a good way to go. I also think the format of the film -- non-stop sound bites -- and the narrow focus (on Brits in the trenches) represents a lost opportunity. Would have preferred a three-hour doco with a broader focus and magisterial narration.
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