Aaron Marcus, with 36 years of acting experience, explains ADR (automated dialogue replacement) and shares two techniques for nailing it: listen for the studio beeps to hit your timing, and memorize your lines so you can watch the scene on the monitor.
Do you know what ADR means? If you're an actor, you really should know. And when you watch this video, I'm going to be sharing with you not only what ADR voiceover work is all about, but also 2 techniques that will be really helpful to you if you're doing ADR work. And if you watch this video to the very end, you're going to get a great bonus. It's something you really want to watch, and it's absolutely free. Okay, let's get started. Hey, I'm Aaron Marcus, and welcome to the Actor and Model Quick Tips channel and the Actor Career Center, where basically what I do is I share information that I've learned from being a full-time actor for a little over 36 years and booking almost 1,300 jobs. If you haven't done this yet, don't forget, click the subscribe button, click the notification bell so that way you always know when I upload a new video. And if you like the video, give it a thumbs up. That's really helpful. So what does ADR mean? One is automated dialogue replacement. I don't know why they say automated, because we're humans. We actually— we're not automated. The other is additional dialogue replacement. And I, I've been really fortunate. I've had a chance to do it a few times. And so here's what takes place. This is what ADR is all about. The first time I ever did ADR work, I had worked on a television show, and very exciting, it was a network show. It was a number of years ago, and about a week after the shoot, I got— I was contacted through the agent from production saying that I needed to come back to New York and do some ADR work. I needed to redo some lines. So I don't know about you guys, but at least at that time period, I started getting paranoid. I did. I'll be very honest with you. I started thinking, uh-oh, they hated my lines, they didn't believe them, I'm not a good actor, I have to redo them because it doesn't work in the scene. So that's where I initially went, and But I said, yeah, sure, I'll be there. Now meanwhile, I had never done ADR work before. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea what I was walking into. And I thought I was just going to record, you know, some, some lines or re-record some lines. So go to the studio and I'm in the editing booth, and here's what I learned. First of all, it had nothing to do with them not liking my lines. Here's what happened. I was a doctor in a scene, and there was— there were some extras who were working in the scene, and they were talking. And what happened was the sound person couldn't get rid of their noise, couldn't get rid of their background talking to get a clean shot of my dialogue. So once again, It had nothing to do with perform— poor performance or anything. They just needed a clean, a clean work of my lines that they could use. So that's all it was. Now here's the other thing, and once again, I was learning this on the spot because I had no idea what I was doing. You're sitting in the— in this room, there's a giant monitor on the wall. I was given headphones, and basically I hear beeps in my headphones. So it's beep, beep, and then on the 3rd beep, that's when my line starts to happen. And you can see, you know, you can see the scene taking place, and what you have to do is say the lines so that the words actually fit perfectly as the actor is saying them. So, you know what, first I was really nervous about it because I thought that's going to be impossible. How do you do that to make it so perfect? But here's what I learned, and here's the second technique. If you know the dialogue really well and, and it's really comfortable to you, you remember how you did it. Then what I found was it was really, really helpful not having to look down at the sides at all and just look up at the monitor. And honestly, I wasn't even trying to make sure everything fit. It just did. Because I remember— I remembered how I did the lines, and I had the lines still in my head. So I just said them and it worked out perfectly. I did a couple of takes just because they wanted, you know, some backups, but I thought that I hit them every single time. So, so the key, the key things to remember is that certainly don't start feeling paranoid that you goofed up and that you're horrible. And the other thing too is just make sure that you listen for the beeps and you'll feel the rhythm as to when the next beep is. So, you know, when to get started. And the second part of that is just make sure you have your lines down really well so that you can easily do it without having to refer to the lines in any way. So for the bonus I promised you, this is a great way of preparing if you have a narration job of just making sure you don't prepare too much, and you'll see what I'm talking about in this free video. You should see the link in the top corner, and hope you enjoy it. And hey, don't forget, once again, if you haven't done this yet, subscribe. Click the subscribe button, the notification bell. If you like it, please give it a thumbs up, and most importantly, share, share the link with your actor friends. Help them as well. Really want to build a community with people helping each other and Sharing information with each other. To me, that's what this whole channel is about. Anyhow, I'm Aaron Marcus, and I can't wait to talk with you again soon. See ya.
