The art of dialogue editing
When should you cut stumbles, stammers, and ums and when should you leave them? What about if your guest makes a weird gulpy breathing sound or snort-laughs like they got milk up their nose or says “like” a lot? Should you cut those? The answer: sometimes.
We often cut tape for time or because we’re worried it will annoy or distract listeners but it’s all too easy to lose track of the intricacies that give our conversations life. If you’re just a beginner or even if you’ve been cutting tape for a while now and are struggling to make your characters sing, this online workshop with engineer and producer Michael Raphael will help you to sharpen your ears and learn to decide with confidence what to cut and what to keep.
Michael will demonstrate the power of voice and explain how our cadence, accents and patterns of speech are one of the last bastions of regionalism in the world. He’ll teach you the finer points of dialogue editing for reported pieces and interviews and you’ll leave class with a solid understanding of how you can preserve these powerful and critical identifiers of who we are and how we tell stories. Come prepared to listen deeply and have an active back and forth with your instructor and classmates.
- During the first half of the class, you will be asked to listen closely to the spoken word and identify and variety of characteristics you are hearing.
- During the second half Michael will review best practices for edits while he demonstrates techniques in real time. The session he uses will be chosen from among participant submissions. A link will be shared after sign up where you can submit a Pro Tools or Reaper session of your own.
- This class is capped at 15.
About Your Instructor
Michael Raphael
Testimonials
Super hands on and practical. Having the real examples helps a lot.
Great to see behind the scenes of producers who are more experienced than I am. I enjoyed hearing some favorite/exemplary clips. Most important to me were the tips on the nitty-gritty of making an edit sound clean and natural, from the reinforcement of not cutting halfway between words (something I'd figured out myself), to finding breaths and even the ends of other words elsewhere in the tape - I'm finding that I'm paying more attention to my cuts now.
I enjoyed the tips on how to maintain pacing and making smoother cuts. I am still using some of the pacing tips and they work fantastically.