Making an ADR Que Sheet

Making an ADR Que Sheet
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Looping

Most feature films will require some sort of looping of dialogue during post-production. This looping, called Automatic Dialogue Replacement, needs to be done when the right sound is not caught during production. To keep this process organized you often need to create an Automatic Dialogue Replacement Cue Sheet.

ADR

The ADR coordinator, which will likely be the editor or sound engineer, will oversee this. During the editing stage the editor will go through the entire video, story editing it until it is a completed rough cut. From here they will go through and try to identify problem areas that are going to need to be corrected with dialogue looping.

Relevant Information

They begin marking this on a specialized form for looping. This form is different for everyone that uses it, but often it is comprised of six columns. The first one is for the tape numbers of the specific points. The second one is for the start and stop points in the time code of that tape as to where you want to replace dialogue. This needs to be very specific and down to the millisecond. The next column is often for the channel the audio was recorded on, but this is usually for larger films and you may not need to concern yourself with that. The following column is where you actually write out the dialogue that is going to be there. Write is out exactly as the director wants it to appear, including misused words and slang pronunciations. It should be also exactly as was said on set because the words will have to match the lip and body movements. Lastly you are going to need some notes, perhaps about the scene or the behavior of the character.

Formatting

At the top of the form you need to make sure to label it appropriately to differentiate it from similar documents such as log notes. Give it a page number and any relevant script information. Try putting the names of each actor that is going to have to do the recording, but that is an optional addition.

Using the Document

Make sure that the document is detailed and used for absolutely every piece of dialogue looping that you need. This is going to make sure that nothing is overlooked and that what needs to be done is done in the appropriate way.