Ever have one of those projects...

Question

... that feels like it's never going to end or that it just can't be done.

Then, when you finally finish... you realize you just totally crushed it and you hear angels singing Leonard Cohen's "Hallejula"?

I just had one of those moments on an ADR project that took 8 weeks of about 20 hours a week (Dialog editing is one of my weak spots since I mostly prefer sound design and mixing). The original location recording had several different types of major broadband noise and static spikes and volume jumps all through out it (completely unusable). Unfortunately the scene was 13m long and was wall to wall dialog. I had to do the adr, sync, foley, then do NR, editing and mix. Unfortunately for me I undercharged and that made me less enthusiastic to tackle it once I realized how deep I got myself in. It eventually became a mission just to see if I could get it done.

I finally did it and man, does it feel good. It's nice to know you can move those mountains if you keep your nose to the grindstone and resist the temptation to give up.

I thought I'd bring it up, maybe see if you guys have any similar stories so hopefully we can all remember that we can accomplish anything if we set our hearts and minds to it.

Here's to those moments!

• Cheers!

Answer 1

I had to create from nothing 3 whole lines of re-written dialogue for an actor who was on a cruise ship in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and the film was being released the day after he got back. It was someone else's mistake which somehow landed on my lap and I had a gun to my head to fix it by the release.

I used my own voice for sibilance and consonants which didn't require the actor's vocal cords (Fs, Ss, Ts, Ks, CHs, etc)

I spent a week working on these 3 sentences using the rest of his dialogue, finding the right vowel sounds because an N going into an A sounds different than an N going into an E, for example.

When I finished, I went over with the sound super not to tell anyone who didn't know already about what I did so people didn't have attention on it and weren't "listening out for those three lines".

The film was passed with 10 other little fixes which didn't have anything to do with the 3 whole lines I created from literally scratch.

That was a big accomplishment for me.