Looping, as I recently learned on Johnny LA’s webpage, is the re-recording of dialog by the actors after the filming; they are lip-synching their original spoken words all over again.
My questions are, how often is this done for big-studio pictures - universally? And isn’t it just hell on the actors? You’re already acted the scene, you’re poured your heart and soul into it, and now you have to do it again, in a little room with headphones on, in exactly the same way as you did it before.
Doesn’t acting often involve some improvising in the way you deliver your lines? How can you then re-create the lines the exact same way, when you’re not improvising anymore but rigidly bound by your original lip and jaw movements? Is this as big a pain in the butt for the actors as I think it is?
Yes, looping is universal, not just in big-studio pictures, but in almost any film. You try and get the sound as clean as possible on set to minimize looping, but there’s always going to be some. There might be a creak from the dolly over a critical line, a mumbled word in the otherwise best take, etc. Looping time is a standard thing to be included in actors contracts – they know there’s almost always going to be some.
Yes, it can be difficult for actors. Probably not quite as bad as you think it is, but yes, it’s difficult for them to match exactly. That’s one of the reasons you try and minimize looping. You certainly don’t want to have to redo a big chunk of dialogue. Usually, it’s a line here and a line there, so matching it exactly the way you did before is tough, but not impossible.
Keep in mind, you’re watching your performance on the screen, and hearing the matching audio in your headphones, so you know how you did it the first time. And you can listen to the original over and over until you’ve got it. The director is also there with you, giving direction to match, and you can do it over and over again until you get it right. Audio tape is much cheaper than film, and you can reuse it if you screw up!
Most actors don’t like looping, for precisely the reasons you mention.
Are you saying they don’t do all of it, just the parts that need work?
Correct. Lots of stuff can go wrong with a take; in addition to what Anamorphic mentions, you might have an airplane zoom overhead, or the actor might be sick and croaky that day, or (considering Harry Potter) that might have been a bad week for young actors on the edge of puberty controlling their breaking voices. As I recall, a whole lot of dialogue had to be looped for the Sean Connery jungle thriller Medicine Man because the location insects were so damn loud.
That’s why an experienced production crew will take a few moments to record “room hum.” That means everybody sits down and shuts up, and the sound team records a couple of minutes of silence in the location. That may seem weird to somebody who’s never worked on a film, but every location has a slightly different sound quality, which further changes from day to day if not hour to hour. That background is necessary for building a seamless foundation for re-recorded dialogue; without it, the looped lines wouldn’t match exactly, as the background would drop out. Major Hollywood movies may replace huge sections of their soundtrack in the editing room, particularly during action sequences, but you still have to keep careful track of what the dialogue sounds like.
If you want to see what a looping session looks like, rent the movie Postcards from the Edge. There’s a scene in which the Meryl Streep character stands in front of a movie screen with microphone and headset and attempts to replicate her line readings from months beforehand.