Filming for Easy Dub

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Extra: "Bad news. It seems our animation budget has been seriously depleted by excessive robot battles! To correct for it, we've given strict orders to eliminate all lip-synching from the remainder of this movie!"
[...]
Announcer: "Nobody look at the camera! Nobody look at the camera!"

—Ultra City 6060 (a Gag Dub of Patlabor)

Maybe the characters are having a heartfelt conversation while looking out over the horizon. Maybe they're monologuing in a corner of a darkened room in an over the shoulder kind of camera shot, or at a Dutch Angle.

Now mute your television and notice the screen hasn't changed at all.

When you don't have to draw a face (or at least the mouth) this can make scenes and voice dubbing much easier to do. Another trick is to pull the 'camera' back far enough so that you only have to animate gross motions.

For comedy, the lack of expression can lead to hilarious non sequiturs. If it goes on too long, it looks like a cheap trick to save on the budget, so the scene should ideally have lots of additional crowd and sound effects to distract us from that fact.

In Live Action, this is useful when stand-ins and stuntmen are required for certain scenes, or when someone is playing two characters in the same scene. The trope also comes into play when a movie or TV show is filmed to make it easier to add noises, music, or dialogue after the filming itself. If a work is going to be dubbed, this is also useful for briefly avoiding Lip Lock and allowing the voice actors more freedom.

See also No Mouth.

Examples of Filming for Easy Dub include:

Advertising

  • In an online musical commercial for Burger King's breakfast menu, you are prompted to enter your name. During the commercial, the song will have your name dubbed into the lyrics, but every time it is sung, a breakfast sandwich will conveniently be covering the mouth of the main singer.
  • Advertisements for lotteries require this trope: since the jackpot increases as it it remains unclaimed, the new dollar amount must be re-dubbed to show it changed.

Anime and Manga

  • Neon Genesis Evangelion was infamous for this kind of cost cutting. One example had characters with their backs to the camera while in an elevator... without even any dialogue or music.
    • Gendo does this all the time with the Gendo pose—so much that this became a meme.
    • In fact, one can pick the precise moment that their budget began to run out. At one point, during a briefing, one of the techies holds a clipboard up to cover his mouth. After that point, if the sequence isn't going all-out with the animation, it'll be this.
  • .hack occasionally had people talking slightly out of shot.
    • "Occasionally?" .Hack//Sign could be renamed as .Hack//Radio Drama and Accompanying Panorama; no one would notice.
  • Characters in Noir sometimes spoke while holding their handguns in front of their mouths.
  • Cleverly lampshade-hung in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex—members of Section 9 can communicate by a cybernetic form of telepathy, which also happens to allow long stretches of dialogue without those pesky mouth movements. This went further in SAC:2 with a character who had a customised face made up (a pretty one); it wasn't designed for normal use, and so he could barely open and close his mouth or show expression. It's like cyber Botox.
    • They take the whole thing a step further: when the characters know someone is trying to lip-read their conversation, they pretend to say things while having a completely different conversation in their heads.
  • This seems to happen a lot with Kyon from Haruhi Suzumiya, apparently an artifact from the Light Novels in which little distinction is made between Kyon's thoughts, Kyon's words as narrator, and Kyon's spoken dialogue.
  • The English dub of Area 88 added brevity codes during combat that weren't present in the Japanese dub. This was possible because, during all the air combat sequences, pilots are wearing oxygen masks that cover their mouths.
  • What's that, Death Note art team? It's time for a series of monologues? Time for close-ups on Light's magazine collection, L's food, Near's toys, Misa's Gothic junk, Mello's hands...
  • For the K-On! end credits music videos, Mio tends to hold her microphone in such way that it happens to save the animators from having to lip sync the singing.
  • The sequences when Kaze fires the Magun in Final Fantasy Unlimited. Although he's facing the camera, his clothes cover his mouth, allowing him to say anything without any Mouth Flaps.

Film

"Coleman Francis solves the problem of sound sync!"

  • Back to The Future Part 2 and 3 did this, when Crispin Glover didn't return for them; in 2015, his character is played by actor Jeffrey Weissman, in heavy old-age makeup and hung upside down by a "medical device", due to a "golfing accident".
    • Weissman also appears in 1955, distant, and back turned, under even heavier makeup to make him look close enough like Glover to pass.
    • In part 3, his short appearance had him wearing sun-glasses at a distance. Footage of Glover from the original film is also in parts of the 1955 revisit.
      • Do a Google search of "Jeffrey Weissman + Back to the Future 2", and this is what you'll find; those second two pics are pretty freaky, huh?
  • Orson Welles's film of Othello was famously made in bits and pieces over several years on a shoestring budget, to the extent that most (if not all) of the footage was shot without sound. Welles found a way around this by beginning most of his longer soliloquies with characters facing away from the camera, forcing angles and avoiding close-ups, and using shadows and dramatic lighting extensively to obscure the faces. Most critics agree that the movie turned out better and more cinematic than most Shakespeare films as a result of these cost-saving measures than it would have had Welles been given a bigger budget. It even won top prize at Cannes.
  • A sad use of this was for the last Three Stooges shorts that featured Shemp, filmed after Shemp had died. They used footage from previously-filmed shorts, had a pale imitation as a stand-in for whatever new bits needed filming, made a storyline to fit what they had to make, and cranked out another short.
  • Trail of The Pink Panther did this because Peter Sellers died before the film was finished. The first half is built around unused footage from The Pink Panther Strikes Again. The second half is mostly a Clip Show. And twice this trope is invoked with a new-footage stand-in (once in the very last scene) to connect the material.
    • When Sellers was alive, this trope was used to switch between him and stuntmen.
  • One of the many dub tricks used in Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, along with covering one's mouth with their hand, speaking off-screen, and just plain saying whatever. (It's a comedy; they can get away with it.)
    • Don't forget ventriloquism.
    • One character in particular had long stretches of saying only "eee-ooo-eee-ooo-eee-ooo" when they ran out of material for her to say, but her mouth was still moving.
  • For A Fistful of Dollars, they created an extra opening to make the whole thing more suitable for little children — without having Clint Eastwood at their disposal. It looks kind of ridiculous.
    • Suitable for little...ERROR...does not compute...does not compute...
      • It's not as stupid as it sounds, since in the Sixties age ratings didn't exist and it was common to take the entire family to see a movie, regardless of how appropriate or comprehensible it was for the children. A bit of kid-aimed fanservice might keep the things from screaming in boredom during the good bits.
  • School of Rock features this—but instead of Jack Black, it's a guitar. In the climax of the film, Jack breaks out a guitar solo; but his guitar never faces the camera, and so you don't see the necessary hand movements to perform the solo.
    • This is less jarring as Black does play guitar and we often see his hands during the remainder of the film.
    • Earlier, Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure did the same thing with Rufus's amazing guitar solo at the end of the film.
  • The movie Game of Death: Bruce Lee died before the filming of the movie finished, but he did film some wicked fight scenes. So, the guys making the movie finished it anyway and used this technique, along with any other technique to obscure the stand-in's face (even a cardboard cutout of Bruce Lee's face when the character is seen through a mirror).
    • In an eerie case of Generation Xerox, The Crow had to be finished in much the same way after the death of Bruce's son, Brandon. Fortunately, advanced special-effects techniques kept the obvious usage of this trope to a minimum.
  • Similarly, Gladiator did this when Oliver Reed died during filming, along with lots of CGI and some screenplay changes (Proximo was supposed to be one of the "carriers" in the final scene).
  • The classic final line in Casablanca, "Louis I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" was thought up by the producer and dubbed in by Humphrey Bogart after filming was completed.
  • Every scene in the first Harry Potter film which mentioned the title stone by name was filmed once with the actors saying "Philosopher's Stone" and once with them saying "Sorcerer's Stone". When the trio goes to confront Hagrid about the stone, they say the stone's name after his door has obscured their mouths.

Live-Action TV

  • In the Fifth Doctor Doctor Who story Black Orchid, there is a character named Latoni who is a South American Indian complete with a large plate massively extending his lower lip. Despite this, he is somehow able to converse in perfectly normal BBC English... but only long shots or when shot from behind.
    • The non-talking variety happened in Time and the Rani. When the Doctor regenerated from his sixth form to his seventh (The Nth Doctor), Colin Baker (the sixth Doctor) refused to film his last scene of falling to the ground and regenerating due to the unpleasant circumstances of his being let go by The BBC. Therefore, Sylvester McCoy, the seventh Doctor, was forced to don a blonde curly wig and lie face down, before turning over just as the regeneration effects conveniently obscure his facial features with a bright glowing light. The truth is it doesn't even work: if you look closely you can see that it is Sylvester McCoy under the glowy effect, and you can see the line between the wig and his head.
    • A similar situation led to Quinn and Colin having to awkwardly keep their heads down until they reached the portal in the fifth season premiere of Sliders. Quinn's voice was also noticeably not his own, even though all he says is "Go! Go!" Then a portal accident leads to Colin's disappearance and Quinn's getting The Nth Doctor and a Suspiciously Similar Substitute at once.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series is infamous for inverting this. In just about every fight scene, absolutely no effort was made to hide that a stunt double was doing most of the fighting. In many cases, you can clearly see the face of Not!William Shatner.
    • As SF Debris points out, this is at least partly because TV screens in the sixties were much smaller, had much poorer reception and resolution and you were only seeing the episode once (no VCR or DVD). It was much easier to get away with this sort of thing back then.
  • In the second season of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers after Austin St. John, Thuy Trang, and Walter Jones were fired, Saban didn't want the transition to their replacements to be overly jarring. So they used this technique for EIGHT concurrent episodes to represent Jason, Trini, and Zack. Backs of the heads of body doubles, shots at wide angles, liberal use of Stock Footage, voice doubles, silhouetted by sunset.... you name it, they did it. Granted, they had some help—most of the action sequences had them in helmeted costumes—but the voice doubles weren't especially convincing.
  • This was used in Red Dwarf when Lister's love interest Kochanski (Clare Grogan) was in a scene but had no dialogue, so "somehow it was forgotten that she would need to be there" [DVD commentary]. Her role was filled by the sound editor in a big hat.
  • The classic back-of-the-stuntman's-head version can be seen in almost any episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—any scene of Buffy fighting in which she is not shown face-on is almost certainly the stuntwoman who did her more acrobatic moves.
    • And even then, you could often see that the stunt people looked significantly different from the characters. The worst example would probably be when Buffy fought the crazy, murderous lunchlady. Not only did the stunt double have a much thinner build than the overweight lunchlady, but the differences between actress and stunt double causes the audience to think one of them was a man.
  • The old sitcom The Patty Duke Show had Patty Duke play a double role as "identical cousins". Whenever the two needed to interact, one was played by Ms. Duke, and the other by the back of a stand-in's head.
  • The Drew Carey Show played with this for its contests where a winner wasn't chosen by the time of filming, even holding a baby in front of the cast's faces to name it. Once it was even parodied when Drew looked straight at the camera with a wide open mouth shot that was dubbed over.
  • Like many lazy production techniques, parodied in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. The episode "The Apes of Wrath" culminates in a long, Special Effects Failure-filled motorcycle chase with a malevolent ape-man. Afterward, Liz asks Rick to explain how the circumstances of the episode occurred, which is clearly dubbed in with Liz's mouth hidden behind a stack of books. Then, the camera is fixed on a potted plant in the corner while Rick delivers several paragraphs of rapid-fire Techno Babble explaining what was going on and how he saved the day.

Video Games

  • A variation appears in Metal Gear Solid 2. It's arguably present in the whole franchise, but the second was particularly bad. Long dialogue-based scenes have a tendency to take place on the "CODEC" screen, as talking heads. Justifiable in many cases; but when the characters are in the same room (apparently this method stops people from overhearing because it's all subvocal or some such), then you have a right to feel short-changed.
    • The same series did this better and more artfully in Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops. Thanks to the limitations of the PSP, the cutscenes were bare-bones semi-animated images. But the art was in the unorthodox scratchy rendering of the series comic book; the animation perfectly suited the bleak-but-exciting feel; and the Voice Actors, liberated from having to Lip Lock, gave an exceptionally good performance.
  • Used with great effect by the voice actor of Auron in Final Fantasy X, whose mouth is covered for almost the entire game.
    • Given that you can see his mouth in most shots (he's not wearing a mask, his collar is just turned up), it isn't as strongly abused as most people think.

Web Original

  • Compromised in the Homestar Runner sbemail segments. Whenever he's typing at his computer and thus facing away from the viewer, Strong Bad's head is deliberately more animated than he usually is while facing the viewer, presumably to give us something interesting to look at.
    • Originally, you could see the reflection of his mouth. Soon, they decided to make it easier by having his head cover the reflection of his mouth, and just shake a little from time to time. Now his head shakes constantly; it would be easier to just animate the reflection.
    • They later admitted, "We thought that it would be quicker if we put the foreground head over the mouth and just shake his head around, which now takes way longer than it ever took to just make his mouth move." [1]
    • Subverted in the case of Homestar himself: you can see his oversized underbite moving even when he's facing away. So in the occasional scene where's he's typing at the computer, they have to animate two sets of mouths.
  • While plenty of anime use this trick a lot, it's doubly noticeable in The Abridged Series versions, in which many editors will specifically choose to use shots with no mouth visible whenever possible to avoid having to re-sync lip flaps. Of course, there are exceptions.
  • Parodied in one of the 5-Second Films' in their first compilation. They were in a competition to produce a short film based on the words 'My eyes are killing me'. Other groups in these would normally make the film beforehand and shove the words in somewhere, but one of their short sketches had one character obviously covering his face with a cup to say the phrase where it really didn't fit.

Western Animation

  • This sort of thing is quite noticeable in Star Trek: The Animated Series.
    • And everything else Filmation made.
  • In the making-of documentary for The Wrong Trousers, Nick Park mentions how handy it is to have shots where characters are speaking from offscreen or are holding up a newspaper in front of their face or something.
  • An episode of The Simpsons about Superbowl XXXIII had everyone cover their mouths with beer mugs as obviously as possible when mentioning the Falcons or Broncos by name, a nod to the animation being done long before it was known what teams would be playing. The gag is then extended to Bill Clinton's status as President (theoretically in contest at the time) and Hillary Clinton's status as his wife (also theoretically in contest at the time).
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