Chapter 4

Dealing with Dialogue

Dialogue forms the backbone of most movies and TV programmes. Here, I consider ways of dealing with dialogue from whatever source: script, interview, discussion, or actuality.

This chapter is divided as follows:

• 4.1 Fundamentals of Editing Speech—Finding the best place for an edit within a word can be tricky.
• 4.2 Rhythm of the Spoken Word—There is as much phrasing in the melodic line of speech as in music. You can do terrific harm to this hidden melodic line if you don’t recognise it’s there and respect it.
• 4.3 Editing Dialogue—In this section, I examine the differences between two main sources of the spoken word coming into the edit suite: scripted dialogue and free-flowing speech.
• 4.4 Key Points—Dealing with Dialogue

4.1 Fundamentals of Editing Speech

So often when you are editing speech, you are searching for that point where the audio join is invisible or, more accurately, inaudible.

 My Word—Editing Vowels and Consonants

The best place to join two bits of dialogue together is in the gaps between words. Sometimes these gaps are very short or even nonexistent, and you’ll have to place your edit on a word. Those of you who have tried this already know it is much easier to place a good-sounding cut on consonants rather than on vowels. Poppy sounds like Ps and Bs or hissy sounds like Ss and Cs are perfect for hiding sound edits. Vowels are difficult because they are tonal in nature and have an inbuilt pitch. Just try saying ‘La’ and stretch it out and you’ll see what I mean; the sound you are making has a fundamental frequency associated with it. Repeat the ‘La’ 10 minutes later, and it will probably be at a slightly different pitch, making a satisfactory edit between them difficult, if not impossible. It’s much easier to find a nearby friendly P, B, C, or S sound.

Have a go at Exercise 20: Editing Dialogue Sounds.

 Down Your Way—Move the Edit Around

For scripted dialogue in particular, we have already discovered it isn’t necessary to put the sound edit on the same frame as the picture cut. Sometimes, superior sounding results can be achieved by moving the sound edit to the nearest synchronous consonant. Different performances of the same words usually keep in sync long enough for you to find an adjacent point to get across to the new sound.

Sometimes, with the use of over-shoulder and reaction shots, you are able to keep the same sound performance going over several changes of vision. If you are happy with a particular delivery, why make unnecessary work for yourself in the soundtrack?

  Breathless—Breaths and What to Do with Them

We all have to breathe, even actors, reporters, and presenters, but this is yet another problem with which an editor has to deal.

How and when we breathe during any speech depends completely on the content and tone of that conversation. When a person is shouting, he or she is barking out much more air than whispered speech. The shouter will have to breathe more heavily, and more often, while the rant goes on. Also, when an actor delivers a long sentence, he or she will usually delay the next intake of breath until the point is made and the sentence finished. This is generally followed by a large intake of breath to refill the lungs before the next paragraph continues.

You might be asking yourself what this has to do with editing. Well, the answer is quite a lot, because the clumsy removal of a breath in the process of editing unwanted dialogue can produce a poor result, with no obvious reason why, other than the fact that a breath is missing. Sometimes the removal of a breath will work, and it’s only with practice that you’ll know when you can get away with such a cut.

Some sound edits just can’t be done because of inflexion problems, so don’t be afraid to reject these as unworkable. However, an editor can’t just sit back and declare impossibility, because your next words should be ‘tell you what we can do….’

It can be the case that the insertion of a breath from elsewhere in the dialogue track is able to correctly space a troublesome edit.

No chance for a breather now; Exercise 21: Breaths is waiting.

4.2 Rhythm of the Spoken Word

An editor spends more of his or her time editing the spoken word than anything else. This is done with the intention of making such conversations (scripted or otherwise) more concise, understandable, and attractive, so that they can more accurately convey what was intended by the author or the participants. As you gain experience dealing with dialogue joins, you’ll be able to hear in your own mind the results of many possible and different edits in the speech you are presented with without actually trying them out for real. With this skill, you’ll instinctively concentrate on phrases that, when joined together, are more likely to achieve satisfactory results.

A TYPICAL EDIT SUITE LAYOUT USING TWO COMPUTER MONITORS AND HD PICTURE MONITOR.

 Eyes Wide Shut—Close Your Eyes and Listen

When you’re editing tricky dialogue, the vision can often just get in the way. To solve the problem, I find it useful to look away from the pictures and get the sound right first, and then, only when this has been achieved, do I address the vision and adjust the pictures to suit the newly created soundtrack, frequently with a well-placed change of shot.

It’s a sad and simple fact that whenever you make the slightest alteration to the timing of the soundtrack, you have to edit the pictures as well. Suddenly, working in radio seems very attractive.

 Poetry Please—The Rhythm of Dialogue

All dialogue has a rhythmic and tonal line just as complex as a musical melody; all you have to do as an editor is train your ears to hear it. Actors know this; after all, they are constantly timing themselves to their fellow performers as they fire perfectly intoned lines at each other…well, at least that’s the theory. Directors also know this, as they tune individual performances towards a combined perfection.

Here comes the bad news: some of this natural rhythmic sense has to be already inside you in some form or another. Editing is called a craft for this very reason. You almost have to imagine yourself in the role of a conductor of an orchestra, calling in the strings, brass, or percussion at just the right moment to reflect what is written in the score…I mean script. What remains after any dialogue removal must not only make sense grammatically, but the new melodic and rhythmic line created by that edit must also make sense musically. This is called intonation.

Talking of orchestras, I can think of two examples where conversations are mimicked in music. First, the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4, where the piano obviously has a calming conversation with an angry orchestra, and second, the third movement from the Fantastic Symphony by Hector Berlioz, where two shepherds are calling to each other across a wide and open landscape, depicted by a cor anglais and offstage oboe, while a distant storm approaches. Both are well worth a listen.

Back to the plot with an exercise: Exercise 22: Dialogue Rhythm.

 Torn Curtain—Repairing Dialogue

It sometimes happens that your best take has a fluff in it, which can be annoying if this is the only flaw in an otherwise perfect version of the action from all other points of view, such as camera, sound, lighting, and so forth. It would be a shame to throw this away and have to use a less good take just for the sake of a couple of fluffy words.

Well, the solution is to attempt a dialogue repair using as little as perhaps a single word from another take.

I think this is best demonstrated with an exercise, Exercise 23: Dialogue Repair, which is next.

4.3 Editing Dialogue

An editor has to deal with two main sources of the spoken word: scripted dialogue in its many incarnations, such as acted lines, narration, and voiceovers, and free-flowing speech, which is more common in interviews, commentaries, or vox-pop situations. To preserve their individual characteristics, they have to be treated by an editor in slightly different ways.

 An Actor’s Life for Me—Dealing with Scripted Dialogue

By the time scripted and filmed dialogue comes to you, it should be a fair likeness of what the director, the writers, and the actors intend to convey in terms of performance. If you are able to clearly hear the rhythmic and melodic line in spoken dialogue, you will be better able to preserve, and even enhance, this musical line through the necessary joins in performance that are required to produce an edited scene. But remember, especially in the case of performed drama, that those shots may have been filmed over a long period of time, often out of order and sometimes in circumstances far removed from an environment where any actor can completely attend to the overall pace of a scene.

Here is where a good editor can make such a difference to the final product. This is because after the microscopic work of individual dialogue joins is over, you have to zoom out your attention and deal with the wider aspects of pace and tempo, starting with individual scenes and then to the complete piece.

During this process, you will reexamine the timing of individual cuts, or sections of cuts, to help improve the flow of the programme as a whole.

 Any Answers?—Dealing with Free-Flowing Speech

Free-flowing speech can be sourced in a variety of ways, such as interviews, live commentary, actuality, or just simple discussions. By its very nature, free-flowing speech is not rehearsed in any way, and thus it contains more of the individual speech characteristics of the participants.

Free-flowing speech contains many more delightful and individualistic conversational imperfections than scripted dialogue. All those frequent ‘ums’ and ‘errs’ we all insert into our natural speech are stressed and timed in a unique way to us as individuals. When you edit such dialogue and your subject is in vision, those individual speech characteristics must be preserved. Don’t ‘clean up’ the dialogue too much around edit points, or they will only stick out as different. The only time I would clean-up dialogue is if the subject’s words are being used as a voiceover to alternative pictures. In this situation, some conversational repeats and fluffs can be removed without doing any harm.

Normally, then, let that ‘um’ introduce a new idea, just as it did when it was alongside different dialogue. I say this because with free-flowing speech, an editor is required to ‘cut and paste’ to a far greater extent than is the case with scripted dialogue, and adopt more of an editorial role.

This editorial role will inevitably take you away from the microscopic world of individual sentences to the wider world of content. An editor in this new role has to be aware of many more factors, and I will examine some of these aspects later on when I talk more about interviews in Chapter 8, and also when the topic of editorial responsibility comes up in Chapter 13.

 A Word in Edgeways—Overlapping Dialogue

So often in real-life conversations, in our enthusiasm to get our point across, we will start our reply before the previous speaker has finished. This can sometimes be really annoying, but we all do it, especially when any discussion gets heated. To create this on the screen, some care has to be taken with the shooting of overlapping dialogue, or it will be impossible to edit together.

Actors have to overlap dialogue in shots where both or all participants are framed together, but they can be asked to separate the dialogue when individual singles are being shot. This can be off-putting for them, and many actors would feel this potentially ruins their performance, but the advantage is you have complete control of the timing of any overlap in the edit suite. Some directors share this view, that separating dialogue will potentially damage a performance, and see no reason to artificially make the edit easier. Even in close-ups, therefore, they will let the actors overlap as much as the script calls for and sort it out later. Well, not them themselves, you understand…it’s more likely to be you! But don’t panic, editing ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ dialogue is often easier than you think, probably because vowel sounds are shorter, and the consonants are packed in more tightly.

When the overlap has to be created in the edit suite, all you have to do is to match what the actors gave you in the wider shots and maybe improve it! Split edits (yes, those again) come into their own here, allowing you to bounce to a different shot before or after the interruption.

Editing such overlapping dialogue, or creating an new overlap where one didn’t exist, is great fun, and it can so improve the perception of reality that we all constantly strive for.

 Silent Witness—‘Text-Speak’ and How to Deal with It

Some conversations are silent. That may seem a strange concept, but we do it every day when we text someone using our mobiles. Producing dramatic coverage of a text conversation is mainly a problem for a director or a writer, as they will have to work out at an early stage how this information will get to the viewer.

As far as I can see, there are four main options:

• Show the phone screen.
• Subsequent spoken dialogue could convey the information that was contained in the text to the viewer.
• The text information could remain secret until a future plot revelation.
• Captions, perhaps in the style of phone text, could be superimposed on the picture as the message is typed or read.

I will discuss caption work later on in Chapter 12, but for now two points are worth mentioning. The first is to make sure the caption is large enough and up for long enough. Remember: you know what the caption says, whereas someone reading it for the first time (often in poorer viewing conditions) will not. The second is to highlight this point in your sequence, as this section of vision will almost certainly need to be copied and kept clean of captions, not only to help a future grade (as they usually don’t want to grade your caption work as well) but also for international sales, so that new captions in different languages can be superimposed at a later date on that saved ‘clean’ version.

4.4 Key Points—Dealing with Dialogue

• It is much easier to place successful audio edits on consonants rather than on vowels.
• All dialogue has a rhythm and tonal line, just as complex as a musical melody.
• Breaths in the wrong place can produce poor dialogue joins.
• Sometimes the insertion of a breath pause can cure a troublesome edit.
• If it helps, look away from the pictures when you are dealing with the sound, and once you are happy, adjust the pictures accordingly.
• Any edit must preserve the rhythmic nature of the speech, or create a new one which works equally well.
• Intonation and pitch will sometimes prevent the cleverest of repairs to a dialogue track, but they are worth an attempt most of the time.
• The timing between speeches is crucial to preserve and/or enhance what the participants have given you.
• An editor must provide and create consistency of performance, especially if the filming has taken place over a long period of time.
• Don’t clean up free-flowing speech too much around edits, or it will stick out as different and usually awkward.
• Cleaning up free-flowing speech is more possible if the speech is being used to act as a voiceover for alternative shots.
• Editing free-flowing speech will cause you to adopt more of an editorial role, with all its associated responsibilities.
• Edits (editorial or otherwise) must be done according to an individual’s speech patterns.
• When creating dialogue overlaps in the edit suite, match what the actors have given you and potentially improve it.
• Overlapping dialogue can enhance the impression of conversational reality.
• Any captions representing mobile text conversations must be large enough and up for long enough. Read the words twice, is the golden rule.