Museum of Moving Image

       My experience at The Museum of Moving Image was indeed quite a good one. I was very excited to go there to learn about film and video, but to my surprise, the exhibits that I found most interesting were actually the ones about sound. In all of the videos I've directed (all 4 of them), I was always concerned with how to make the film flow together visually; which angle to take this shot from, how can we portray the characters emotions using their surroundings, that kind of stuff. All of my audio tracks came straight from the crappy mics attached to the school camera's we had to use (It's ok, Prof. Lucas. I'm talking about my high school.), and I never really bothered to change that. Once I saw the Automatic Dialogue Replacement booth, it hit me just how much more film is than just the visual elements.
      My parents were both actors in Ukraine, where they're from. I remember the first time I told my parents I wanted to make movies, they told me about this time they were working on a student film. They told me the hardest part of the whole thing was trying to re-record the dialogue and have it sync perfectly with your mouth. When I first heard that, I didn't really think much of it. I don't think I really understood how hard it was, until I tried it myself. Yea, it's not that easy. The ADR showed me how much work you have to put into recreating dialogue. The words aren't the only thing you have to get right. You have to get the emotion, the emphasis, and all of those things just right. It's easy to tell when a characters body language doesn't match the way the dialogue is spoken.
     My experience in the ADR definitely made me appreciate the hard work voice actors have to put into their performance. It also made me look back and appreciate the work my parents did as actors. Mind you, I'm sure students in Soviet Union-era Ukraine didn't exactly have access to top notch film studio equipment, which most likely made it even harder to do it well.
     My visit to The Museum of Moving Image opened my eyes to aspects of the film industry that I never even thought about. It changed the way I think about making movies, and I'm pretty sure it'll have an effect on the way I make movies in the future.