Sound looping

Kit called me last week to ask me what I was doing on Monday. Her friends were calling in favors they had done for her. They were looking for a male voice to speak Chinese to loop into a scene of a film they were working on. She had offered, but they had wanted a male voice, specifically. She asked if I could help her out. I said, "sure." I was to play a taxi dispatcher.

Last night she told me to meet her on the corner of Varick and Houston. She emerged from the subway and we walked to the studio, just down the block. An original mini was parked outside the building, causing a stir.

The studio slowly filled with people. There were a number of scenes to loop, one being a party scene. A man led Kit and I into a separate room to watch the scene we were looping. I had thought it would be a student film and was surprised to find Michael Keaton on the screen.

He sat in the back of a cab as the driver argued into space. Kit and I listened to the scene a few times to determine what he was saying. The driver complained about working too many hours, and needing to sleep for seven hours before his next shift. He lived in Queens.

Kit and I developed dialogue around what the driver said and then we went into the studio to record. I did a few takes and then walked to the control room. I flipped through the sheet of scenes they were looping and then, since we were there, they asked us to loop a few more scenes. And so Kit and I walked back into the studio and recorded ad-lib a scene between a short order cook and a waitress in a diner, and a scene between two friends crossing the street. We talked about Cherry.

Afterwards we ate at Tomoe. Kit joked that we were now just two degrees separated from Michael Keaton. Or at least our voices are. Posted by eku at November 16, 2004 11:26 AM