Hang on.. that's not her real voice!

My Friend Ted is almost done. All scenes are shot and now there's just a bit of editing and the soundtrack to be done. I saw a rough cut of it last night. It was pretty bad. I shouldn't say that. We're talking about a movie shot with no budget with an entire cast and crew of amateurs, in which case, it wasn't bad, considering.

Of course, it was difficult seeing myself on screen. I look weird, not exactly fat but I have a weird shaped body. My face looks ok in some shots, but just awful in others, and I keep making stupid faces. My voice is strangely high and kind of whispy and my accent is completely unidentifiable and sounds totally different to what I thought it was. And the acting.... fuck! Most of the others looked and sounded quite natural, but I just seemed lame. My voice being high and whispy didn't help, and there was one scene which had a lot of dialogue cut out, that was kind of necessary to the mood, if not the plot. Of course it makes me look crap. Apart from all that I wasn't that bad. I wasn't horribly bothered by it.

The reason I was at the director's place last night was because we had to dub over one scene. It was shot outdoors by the river, with a camera, that's it. No lights or microphones or anything. You can hardly hear our dialogue at all in the original.

I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but when we sat down to copy our lines from the computer, I thought we'd never get it done. There wasn't so much dialogue in the scene, but I saw how much I pause, long or short in one place, rush my lines together in another and make faces all the time. And blink. I blinked a lot in the scene, but this didn't really matter for what I was doing.

I started first and I was supposed to follow myself on the screen, and say the same words the same way. I was completely off. I did it a few times and it was bad every time. Then he did some little fiddling around with the program, moved my dialogue up a bit and it fit perfectly.

After that it looked a bit like this would be possible. We did a tiny bit at a time, and a few times he cut the lines in half, moved a bit back and a bit forward until it fit. Once I started I actually got good at it, and got it right rather quickly. Of course the lines were delivered very blandly and sounded cheesy, I was too busy concentrating on when I was supposed to say the words to act, but it was good enough for the director.

The first few lines were short, so they were easy. The one I was worried about was the longer one, where I paused and huffed and made faces and all that. The first one was terrible. But after listening to it again, and recording it again I got it exactly perfect! Not just exactly perfect after he moved it to the right spot, but I actually followed the picture on the screen and said everything at exactly the right time in exactly the right way. I think it was a fluke.

Anyway it's done. We watched the whole scene afterwards, and of course we know it's dubbed and were listening to those same damn lined and saying them over and over again, so it looked like crap to me, but perhaps to someone who doesn't know will just think it's really bad acting.

At least I convinced him to get rid of one really bad bit. Before my long sentence I said "no no" where I was actually offscreen so it didn't matter exactly when or how I said it, but it was so bad, so unnatural and so wrong for the scene, but because I'd gotten that couple of lines in one go, he just kept it. It wasn't until the end I got him to let me rerecord it. It was simple, I just had to say it, or whatever I wanted that made sense, offscreen. So I replaced it with a "no". It still sounded crap but not nearly as bad.

I should get a copy of it soon. It still won't be the final cut because he wants to record music for it, but we're getting the rough cut version before Christmas, so I'll be able put it up on the internet so you can all see how useless as an actress I am, and see if you can guess which is the scene that's dubbed, (hint, it's an outdoor scene and it's by a river).