Workshop 2 - Dubbing

Media Workshop - Dubbing 

For this workshop me and my partner decided to dub over a scene from The Matrix, where Neo meets Morpheus for the first time. We decided to dub this scene because of there only being two males speak throughout the whole thing meant it was easier to do in pairs, also the scene didn't contain any music so we didn't have to worry about it sounded to off since we weren't able to add any music on top.

Transcript of the Meeting Morpheus Scene

After we both agreed to do this scene we had to find a transcript of the scene so we would know what we would have to say, we also agreed that I would voice Morpheus while my partner, Alfie would voice Neo.

We managed to find a transcript of the film and after enough time we agreed that we would do the recording over the software GarageBand. 

We planned two different ways to record, one was to record one at a time so I would say my lines along with the video (muted) and then Alfie would say his lines along with the video and then after we would edit them together with the video to make it sound good. 

The original plan to record each others lines separate 

The other was to do it all in one recording, so I would say my lines and then Alfie would say his along with me saying mine, after we would then cut it up and match it up with the original video to make the dubbing successful.

After some thought we decided to record both methods and then choose which one sounded the most realistic.

The four audio clips we had to choose from

We started by recording our lines together so I would speak my lines and Alfie would follow up with his. We didn't include any pauses in this as we would later go and cut up the recording to match the pauses with the actual video. This method of recording was the easiest one as we were able to have the transcript up on the same screen alongside GarageBand so it was hard for us to get the recording wrong. Even though we hard the transcript up we slightly messed up the recording times so we had to do 2 takes before we got our first recording happily done.

After that we started recording our line separate, it was much more easier then the previous method to record so no complaints there. This lead us with 4 different audio clips (2 of each method) and we had to then decide which method we were actually going to continue on with. We decided to use our 2nd recording of our lines being spoken as a conversation as it sounded the most natural and we knew we could just cut it up to match alongside the original clip. 

The process of cutting up the audio clips to match the scene

We then downloaded the audio clip to another garage band file so that we could start cutting it to match up the actual clip. While I started cutting the audio clips I started to realise that it was going to sound much more unnatural since in the scene morpheus speaks a lot slower and in my recording I spoke quite fast paced, also I didn't leave much pause between my words being spoken which meant in some of the audio cuts you could hear small snippets of words from previous line at the start of the new line.

I was still able to make it match up with the original scene perfectly in terms of the lip sync but it just sounded a bit more off then what we would have preferred. Alfie decided that he work complete the work at home on a separate piece of software as he didn't see the need to learn a whole new piece of software when he was quite experienced with the software he had at home, Camtasia Studios.

Both me and Alfie were able to complete our audio dubbing clip within the same day, while the final product turned out very well in terms of matching the lip syncing, there are some things I would personally do different next time to help make the audio sound more natural to fit the scene.