How does one get into moving dubbing for foreign films, live action and/or anime? Are there books or classes on this subject somewhere out there?
Bumping once to see if anyone has any info at all on this subject.
I dont have any answers for you, but this is a great movie set in that world (kinda).
Nope-totally different. That movie is about voice-over work in movie trailers, and I am referring to movie dubbing from one language to another.
I did say, kinda…
the company that the main characters work for does all kinds of voiceover work including foreign dubbing, it just focuses on the trailer aspect. And my mentioning it wasn’t meant as anything more than a fun movie rec.
sheesh.
There’s probably a lot of crossover with animation and video game voice actors, commercial voice over, and reading audio books. Most of the well known people in the industry break in via mentorships.
If you personally know someone who is a film distributor - Buys the rights to foreign made films (usually cheap porn, horror and Sci-Fi) that relationship alone can get you the gig.
For a more professional and structured approach you are talking about becoming a Voice Actor.
Typical progression:
1 Study acting. You need to learn how to display emotion and other characteristics (sound like a ‘doctor’ or sound like an ‘emotionally wounded former accountant’ or sound ‘polite but disgusted’) but, obviously, only using your voice and not body language or facial expressions. A sense of ‘timing’ and ‘tempo’ is needed to match delivery of the script to the existing footage.
2 Once you are a trained actor. Record some demos. This can be simply reading scripts or other literary texts while showing good technical speech (clear diction) while also displaying various emotions.
Typically Voice Actors vie for animation projects, documentaries and Voice Over work for adverts but if you are really only interested in dubbing films then your ‘show tape’ (er, ‘Sound Tape’?) should emphasise that.
3 Get an agent. There are talent agencies which specialise in Voice Actors. They will consider your abilities and decide whether you show promise.
Wait for work to come in. Typically, like most acting gigs, you will get nothing… Or perhaps lots.
TCMF-2L
i just ran across this video. Not a “how to get into” but it does have the names of some people working in the field. you might be able to find them and ask them your questions.
Check out a fascinating documentary called “Being George Clooney,” which covers how the dubbing is done for foreign releases. The guy who “is” George Clooney in Brazil is an ER doc.
The guy who is DeNiro in Italy is so well-known that when DeNiro spoke Italian in a film and they left it in, the audience didn’t believe it because he sounded wrong.
On a technical note, how do they prepare a movie for dubbing? A movie’s audio track has a lot of sounds other than the actors speaking. How do you replace the voices without losing the other sounds like background music, laughter and other non-verbal sounds, crowd noises, gunshots and explosions, cars and machinery, breaking glass, animals, etc.?
A lot of that stuff is mixed in later, so not an issue. In the doc referenced above, for one film, which had some groundbreaking SFX they actually blacked out everything but the actors mouths so the dubbers could see what they were trying to align to, but nothing else of the actual film.
Is it standard to do all of the dubbing at the time of a movie’s production? I always thought a lot of dubbing was done later by post-production studios when the distribution rights were sold for a particular country.
That seems like a bad idea. I don’t think most people are used to following another person’s mouth movements (unless they’re lip reading). And if you’re dubbing a language different than what the actor is speaking, it would seem that trying to follow their mouth movements would throw you off. Finally, I feel the person doing the dubbing would do a better job if they could see the context of what the character is speaking about.
True that the timing can change for foreign distribution but all the elements (dialogue, music, sound effects) exist separately and can be re-mixed as needed. They can also re-record dialogue (even with different actors in rare cases) or swap music due to rights issues or whatever.
As for the lips-only version, yes, it was a challenge for the actress for the reasons you cite. It is also a boatload of work for some graphic artist. I was having similar work done on one of my projects and it was around $2.50 per frame for a team in Korea, and took weeks.
Also, they sometimes rewrite the dialogue a bit to make the mouth movements in the new language better match the original actor’s lips (As was seldom done in the Kung-fu movies I loved as a kid)