Almost every line of THE LORD OF THE RINGS had to be re-recorded by the actors in post

The Lord of the Rings it’s an epic masterpiece, but it turns out that creating it was even more painstaking than fans could have imagined. Not only were the sets, makeup, costumes, and the story itself incredibly extensive, but many of the performances were only captured visually the first time around.

In most films, especially those of this magnitude and scope, the actors have to go back to the studio to apply automatic dialogue replacement, or ADR as it is more commonly abbreviated. The actors record the voiceover of their performances where the audio was tainted or too low during the filming of the scene. This is typical for parts of a movie, but in LOTRalmost every line of the entire movie had to be redone!

As reported by / Film, The One Ring fan forum mentions the sound recorder Hammond Peek remembering in a number of Official film magazine of The Lord of the Rings fan club that much of the footage was subjected to aircraft sounds from nearby Wellington Airport. He says:

“Most of the time we would stop and wait for the plane to fly over that particular studio. But ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was such a huge production that, often, time was money and it became a money equation. so much of a day waiting for planes, so this represents so many dollars for such a large crew, operations and equipment rental.It’s much cheaper to just look at the post-sync of those lines [recording them again later in a studio]. “

Dialogue editor Ray Beentjes explained in the magazine Sound and image how this process can be terribly disappointing in regards to an actor’s original performance:

“An actor could have delivered a stellar performance on location, but the audio would often be unusable … They would then have to spend hours in a dubbing room re-recording their lines and, due to the complexity of the production, they could cover those that were six months of filming in a two-day ADR session. This often makes it very difficult to create the same atmosphere again. “

Fortunately, some actors weren’t out of phase with the workload. Gentleman Ian McKellanwho played Gandalf in movies, he said Empire magazine that “ADR is fun” and “a technical challenge that can sometimes improve original readings”.

Whatever they had to do to make those films, it was worth it in the end. They are beautiful works of art that will go down in history as some of the best films ever made.