What is “ADR”?

First off, ADR is an acronym in the film, tv, and production world, something that’s been around for so long a percentage of people saying it has no idea what it really means.

Is it Audio Director Replies? Sure isn’t.

Audible Dialogue Retakes? Not a chance…

A Direct Recording?… let me save you some time for your follow-up guesses:

ADR is an acronym for Additional Dialogue Recording.

Additional Dialogue Recording is done on every project, as it’s a way to record, or re-record as part of post production, audio that wasn’t clearly captured during the shoot. It can add character beats, new jokes, and needed sounds to any scene no matter what was captured on the day.

Plane fly overheard?Oof. Someone drop a can of Diet Coke? Yikes. Co-star ad-lib during their scene partner’s coverage*? Don’t they know how this works?

For all that, and more (train horns, car horns, clown horns…), you need: A. D. R.

The co-star ad-lib is especially complex, and goes into how a scene is shot. Traditionally, you start with an establishing, or wide shot, and then move cameras closer and closer until you’re into coverage. Coverage has the cameras on a single actor – usually a close up – and is where a lot of the meat of a moment can come from. The cleanest, clearest audio a sound department needs for a dialogue-heavy scene comes from the coverage, so it’s vital that the person not on camera knows to give their co-star(s) room to to breath.

Or in this case, speak.

Any quiet room with a microphone and recording device, is the most basic need. ADR can be done anywhere from the post production editing bay, to a recording studio, to a closet with a jacket over your head (for the best closet sound quality).

The more ADR needed, the more professional the set up is required. A line here or there, pickups for dialogue not captured cleanly on set, those can happen in a trailer between shooting scenes of a project – whether that project is the one the new dialogue is for or not.

Want to be ready for your next ADR session? With Scriptation Rehearse, you can prep the new lines as easily as you did the original; and with Record mode, you can see how the new dialogue will sound right in the app.

So now you know what ADR is, but the concept might still seem foreign. Yes, it’s a post production example of how editing is truly ‘the last rewrite‘, as things you can’t go back and shoot can be amended through the new audio recordings. But as is the case with most movie magic, it’s not that simple.

Is this putting new words in the actors mouth? The answer is: Kind of.

If the dialogue is seen on camera, meaning, the viewer can see the actor’s mouth moving? That’s ‘looping‘.

If the dialogue is seen but you’re changing the language, AKA, ‘hey, that sounds like those old kung fu movies?”, that’s dubbing.

If you can’t see the actors mouth in the shot, whether moving or not? That’s your surefire place for ADR.

If someone is talking in a scene and you don’t see them saying the words, that can be ADR. That’s any shot with the back of their heads, if they’re wearing a mask (surgical, tactical, or Deadpool-ical), or if another character walks in front of their faces.

Now that you have this knowledge, you’ll see ADR in many of your favorite shows and movies. Just don’t point it out to your partner every time you see it because we have it on good authority they hate that.

While good ADR is seamless, bad ADR is prevalent — from bad attempts at jokes (think of how bad the originals must have been), to not even trying to match the motions of someone’s mouth, to bad audio mixes making the additional work stand out like a boom mic in the shot.

Got a big ADR session coming up? Then make sure you’re prepped and ready:

Once you’ve taken your project to the edit bay, you start to see all the things missing. All the little pieces that could help moments you want to hammer home, make the plot points land a little harder (or softer), or punch up a scene that is painfully, drastically flat.

ADR will often get temped (temporarily recorded) by the editor or their team, or the writer in the booth, or the director themselves, or anyone in the office who can sound like the character speaking (it helps not have a Drew Barrymore read for a Drew Carey, or vice versa).

Then when you get to the Sound Mix, all the pieces are put together; so all the ADR you recorded from any point with any person can be placed into the show in a way that comes off, hopefully, as seamless.

All kinds of things.

Say you change the name of a character while you’re filming, but you’ve already shot scenes with people referring to the character by the original name? An ADR session can replace all those “Mikes” to “Ikes“.

Going to re-air your favorite R-rated movie on not-R-rated streaming or cable? Then make sure you have rating-appropriate ADR, or you might just cross a stranger in the alps (deep cut for the real ones).

Or, on a much bigger scale, say you completely change a plot point to your big budget action thriller in post production. ADR is going to help you change what your hero is saying so their lines match where the current story is going. Or going back to, if you tried a version and it didn’t work out that well.

Wouldn’t it be easier to have a locked script before shooting? Of course! But a production window is a production window, friends. We lose (Insert Today’s Hottest Star) in three weeks, we need to shoot now! We can always just ADR their lines later.

That’s right, once again we return to one of the most trusted lines in all of filmmaking: FIX IT IN POST.

And a newer way to ADR has made IMAX filming even easier. Take Christopher Nolan’s love of the IMAX cameras; they’re great for capturing big picture scale, but until recently they were also heavy and LOUD — meaning a lot of an actor’s dialogue had to be re-recorded for the sound mix.

Kind of. If you can make the noise into a microphone? You can put it in your show.

With ADR, you can capture moments like this…

Or you can completely replace an actor’s dialogue with a new, better actor’s dialogue, like happened in some projects we won’t list for the sake of not embarrassing potential (or current) Scriptation users.

Or you can attempt to fix a project that isn’t working, and make it somehow work even less, like happened in some projects we won’t list for the sake of not embarrassing potential (or current) Scriptation Teams users.

Or you can… well, you can fix it in post, but you can also, very clearly if you google “Bad ADR“… break it in post. On the day is great, but it doesn’t have to be the final edit. That’s what editing is for!

Ask us, then! Follow @Scriptation on social, and send us your burning questions about ADR, looping, dubbing, any post production sound term. Maybe one day, you won’t have to fix it in post.