sound
Recording the voice track before the puppet moves
Definition
In a scripted stop-motion feature, actors record their dialogue in a booth against the finished script before a single frame of the finished shot is animated -- not against picture, the way live-action ADR loops a performance to footage that already exists, and not to an unscripted interview, the way vox pop technique inverts the order of production entirely. The fixed recording becomes the animator's brief: a director walks a prototype puppet through the selected take as a rehearsal, and only then is that take broken into per-frame phonemes for the animator who will build the finished physical performance around it.
Overview
On Early Man (2018), Aardman animation supervisor Will Becher described the order of operations plainly: voice actors record dialogue first. "Nick works closely with the actors to find the character's voice," Becher said, and once a session is recorded, animators "animate the prototype puppet to recorded dialogue from Nick's session with the actor" -- reading the fixed audio like a director's brief before a finished puppet or set exists (VFX Voice, 2018-04-03).
That order can flatten what the recording session itself actually contributes. Hugh Grant, who voiced the lead in Aardman's The Pirates! Band of Misfits, recorded his lines to a script with no picture to react to -- and by his own account, that session was only the starting point, not the finished performance: "these animated geniuses are doing 80% of the work," he said, describing how the puppet animators built the comedic and emotional performance on top of a voice recording that only had to "hit the right spots and get the right tone" (ScreenCrush, 2012-04-25). The audio is fixed the moment the session wraps; almost everything a viewer reads as "performance" -- timing, expression, physical comedy -- is still ahead of it, built frame by frame against a soundtrack that cannot change.
This is the mirror image of two other stop-motion sound practices. It is not vox pop dialogue, where unscripted, real speech is recorded first and a character is invented to match it (see vox pop dialogue) -- here the script exists first, and a professional actor performs it to a booth microphone with no scene to react to. And it is not ADR or live-action looping, where an actor matches new lines to picture that has already been shot -- in stop motion there is no picture yet; the puppet does not move until the audio already has. Once a take is selected, it moves from the recording stage into the shooting stage through Dragonframe's Audio Workspace and X-Sheet, where the fixed recording is broken into per-frame phonemes so the line animator knows exactly which mouth shape a hand-sculpted or replacement mouth needs to hit on each exposure (see dialogue and lip-sync planning in Dragonframe's X-Sheet).
Workflow
- The script is locked before the recording session -- unlike live-action ADR, there is no picture yet for the actor to match.
- The actor performs the scripted lines to a booth microphone; the session is recorded and edited down to a selected take, the same editorial pass any dialogue recording gets.
- The director and puppet department screen the selected take against a prototype puppet as a rehearsal, reading the physical performance the fixed audio calls for before a finished puppet or set exists.
- The take passes to Dragonframe's Audio Workspace, where it is broken into per-frame phonemes on the X-Sheet so the animator knows which mouth shape to hit on which exposure.
- The animator builds the finished physical performance frame by frame against that fixed, unchangeable audio -- the reverse of live-action ADR, where the performance is already finished on screen and the actor instead matches newly recorded lines to it.