Film dubbing P.S.

[Richard Robin]

Dear colleagues,


I am happy to see responses on Russian dubbing. My own contribution is this:

In 2006, I was invited to watch a cartoon dubbing session at Nevafilm at
their Vasilievsky Ostrov studios. Nevafilm mostly dubs cartoons, including
some major movie house releases as less noble Cartoon Channel fare.

The firm employs local actors who specialize in voice work. Of course,
dubbing cartoons into a foreign language reverses the normal animation
process in which the voices are recorded first and the actual animation is
then fitted to the recorded voices. Here the actor (doing all the voices)
looked at the screen and tried to match his voice to the cartoon’s original
sync dub.

I was surprised that the dubbing director really ran roughshod over the poor
actor. (e.g. Опять опаздываешь! Неужели нельзя внимательнее?) The
опоздание might
have been plus-minus a fifth of a second. The director insisted on take
after take after take. During a break I asked the script editor why the
director insisted on so many takes. After all, on takes that were so close,
any discernible lip flap could be fixed in post production — much more
quickly than the time it took to do 10 takes. The script editor’s answer: “У
нее подход традиционный”.

This episode reinforced my original impression that dubbing in Russia is
very much an old school skill which commands respect but which places great
demands on the dubbers.

-Rich Robin



On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 11:58 PM, Prof Steven P Hill
<s-hill4 at illinois.edu>wrote:

> Dear colleagues, Kayiatos, Robin:
>
> Just occurs to me that Detfil'm's occasional actress Galina Vodianitskaia
> (Vodyanitskaya, 1918- ) in her years at that studio may have specialized
> as a voice actress i.e., may have specialized in dubbing.  I once
> interviewed
> the famous Detfil'm director Il'ia Frez, who'd begun at Detfil'm as an
> assistant, including on the famous WW2 film "Zoia" ("Zoya"), in which young
> Vodianitskaia starred.  Mr Frez may have mentioned about Vodianitskaia's
> frequent work
> in dubbing.  (She was seen ON screen very few times.) -- Steven P Hill,
> U. of Illinois.
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-- 
Richard M. Robin, Ph.D.
Director Russian Language Program
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
202-994-7081
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Russkiy tekst v UTF-8

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