Voice Quality Not Matching Environment
 

Here's a link to a very short short:


Visually I find it very impressive.

The sound is clean, but there is something not right about it to my ear. Perhaps there is too much resonance for the location, which is the wide open desert? I'm not sure.

I imagine they used lavs, but can't find any info. on the sound. (An audio ? was asked already, but the director could not answer it.)

So what do you guys think is going on? Am I losing it, or do the vocals sound somewhat out of place?

Love to hear your feedback. Thanks much!

1) The dialog is clearly ADR
2) It was too windy to use microphones during shooting picture
3) The ADR was recorded way too close
4) The ADR was recorded in an untreated space with early reflections
5) The SFX/Foley was mixed rather heavy-handed IMHO It suffers from the same "too close & too clean" problem.

This should have all been done with a boom, its not that windy.

The perils of ADR
 

Major problems when recording voice for any purpose, and especially spoken voice, have to do with the acoustics of the room in which it is recorded. Many zero-budget (amateur, dare I say) filmmakers record ADR at home. Music recording projects can often get away with this, for two reasons: 1) a sung voice is practically always much louder than a spoken voice, and 2) that voice track will be surrounded by plenty of other sound, which will successfully hide the acoustic properties of the room. Spoken voice requires much better care during the recording.

On few occasions I was in a situation to record spoken voice at my home. I had improvised a sound recording booth by using two large Chinese 4-panel folding screens and enclosing the microphone (and the talent) completely. In addition, I hung beach towels on the inside, from top to bottom of those screens. I also stretched some beech towels above, leaving some space for the air to come in. This treatment completely killed any and all reflections above 2 kHz and very significantly reduced reflections from frequencies below that. The resulting acoustics were adequate enough so that I could put the talent about 50 - 60cm (20-30") away from the microphone, to avoid that annoying (and in the above short so clearly present) proximity effect.