ADR and Ambience

Olson Wells the master himself

ADR stand for "Automated" or "Automatic" Dialog Replacement.

Dialog that cannot be salvaged from production tracks must be re-recorded in a process called looping or ADR.

Looping originally involved recording an actor who spoke lines in sync to "loops" of the image which were played over and over along with matching lengths of recording tape. ADR, though faster, is still painstaking work.

An actor watches the image repeatedly while listening to the original production track on headphones as a guide. The actor then re-performs each line to match the wording and lip movements. Actors vary in their ability to achieve sync and to recapture the emotional tone of their performance.

Marion Brando likes to loop because he doesn't like to freeze a performance until he knows its final context. (People have said that one reason he mumbles is to make the production sound
unusable so that he can make adjustments in looping.)

ADR is usually considered a necessary evil but there are moments when looping can be used not just for technical reasons but to add new character or interpretation to a shot. Just by altering a few key words or phrases an actor can change the emotional bent on a scene.

Ambience

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Ambience pertains to the pervading atmosphere of a place. (Often more of a psychological, rather than technical description)

Ambience is widely used as a synonym for ambient sound. Ambient sound consists of noises present i the environment.

In film and video sound production term Ambience usually means the background sound accompanying a scene.

Ambience is used for background sounds..

(1) present in the original production recording (a better term for it is presence)

(2) deliberately added in sound-effects editing in order to provide an acoustic space around the rest of the dialog and sound effects.

In Silence of the Lambs, when Agent Starling (Jodie Foster) is down with Lecter in the dungeon, there were animal screams and noises built into the ambience. (One element of the ambience is a guy screaming in pain. The screaming was processed, slowed down and played in reverse)

Subjective Ambience:
In the trial scene of Philadelphia - instead of using reverb to a voice as the convention says for hallucinating - sound designer Ron Bochar used subjective ambience. He dropped the previous room tone and shifted the ambient sound. He also changed the spatial placement of the ambient sound - from left, right, and center speakers to surround speakers.

Ambience helps establish the scene and works editorially to support the picture editing by, for example, staying constant across a picture cut to indicate to the audience that no change of space has occurred, but rather only a simple picture edit. Conversely, if ambience changes abruptly at a picture cut, an indication is made to listener that the scene also has changed.