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I recently had the opportunity to help out with another Creative Producer’s project.  She asked me to do some ADR work.

ADR stands for automated dialogue replacement. It is a post-production process in which dialogue that is recorded in a sound studio is laid over the dialogue that was recorded on set.  ADR is often used to fix any problems in the audio that are noticed in post (for example, if a plane flies overhead when an actor is speaking during an outdoor scene, replacing the originally recorded audio with ADR is one way to work around the noise problem).

My Creative Producing colleague had shot the film she was working on in the fall, but with her actors long gone she still needed to have some ADR work done.  That’s where I came in.

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It was fascinating to be able to “switch hats” for a while with this project and be a performer rather than someone working behind the camera.  The movie was a zombie short, and I played a character who spends much of the story running for his life from a pack of zombies.  As I was needed to record all of the character’s lines, this meant embodying a fairly wide range of emotions.  It was certainly strange to, in the sterile studio environment, record several takes of what the character’s scream might sound like as he succumbs to a zombie horde.

Part of the fun of being in film school at Columbia is having the opportunity to jump on a variety of different projects and trying your hand at a variety of new things.  Where else can you be a student one day and flee from zombies the next?