Museum of the Moving Image!

 Sound in film has always been a challenge. The dubbing of older movies often seems silly in modern times, but it had to be done, as cameras were not able to pick up sound. The dubbing is almost always slightly “off” if one looks closely.  Now, as we look at more modern films, most of the time the sound quality as well as the matching of the voice to the actor is much improved. Currently, most cameras used to record movies are “sound capable”, however the quality often does not match the quality which the directors and producers are hoping to achieve, especially in high budget or high action features.

            At the Museum of the Moving Image, the tour guide, or shall I say “educator” took us into a sound booth modeled after those used on films, especially the high budget ones. The actors must sit in a room, a soundproof one, listening to their voice from the recording and watching themselves on the screen. As we learned, this is a practice not often talked about by the director and the actors, however it can prove very challenging to do it right. An actor must have the same emotion in his or her voice whether it be happy, sad, frightened, angry etc. even though they are simply sitting in a room, either with the other actors or alone, matching their voice to the movement of their mouths on the screen.

            During the demonstration, we were able to try out the sound booth for ourselves.  The fact that the challenge was to dub over someone else’s voice was even more difficult as each and every person has a different way of pronouncing their words and thus one who is dubbing for someone else has to match the way they form their words as well.

             Sound is vital part of any film, yet it is not something regular moviegoers, who are not in the industry, or are not film buffs ten to think about.