Jon Bailey: A Word On Automated Dialogue Replacement

Hello, Jon here.

Most of you probably know me as being the voice of Honest Trailers and other big name voice acting projects. I'm a full-time professional voice actor and have been featured in over 100 movie trailers for theatrical film, DVD/Blu-Ray, and even TV promos for shows like Community. I've also done over 200 commercials, video games, audiobook, and documentaries.

‍

One of my primary sources of income is through something called ADR. There are many facets and skills people can dedicate themselves to regarding ADR for film and television. What is ADR exactly? Well, let's take a look.

"Siri, what does ADR mean?"

"Checking..."

"The answer is advanced digital recording!" Siri says...

Close. But more realistically, the term we are looking for is Automated Dialogue Replacement.

ADR usually entails either the replacement of poorly recorded dialogue, incorrect inflections, or bringing in additional dialogue that was not already there. For example, while doing post-audio for a film, if the audio team for whatever reason can't connect with the original actor, or the original actor is too busy or too expensive for whatever reason, ADR will be used to touch up and fill the gaps in the film's dialogue.

So, one example of how this works in my field. I'll get a script sent to me with information regarding an actor, character, and scene, sometimes a reference of who I'm slated to sound like or recreate vocally. This last bit is what's known as voice matching.

There's a massive difference between voice matching and an impression. An impression is more like a caricature that you'd get drawn at the fairgrounds, an overly exaggerated version of yourself. In contrast, a voice match needs to be as close to the original actor as possible. This is just one aspect of ADR.

Another example is an act often colloquially called "looping". One large group of people, known as the "Loop Group" will record together all at once, in order to recreate and simulate background conversations, crowd noise, etc.

There is far more to learn about the process of ADR and all that it entails, but I hope at least you've learned something here today that will get you one step further to your acting career.

- Jon