Western Authenticity in the Screenplay, Shooting and Editing of Vengeance Trail!
(Day 16 Counting Down to Memphis Premiere on April 23!)
AUTHENTICITY! Let's talk about seeking historical accuracy, and A.I. tools.
Vengeance Trail happens in the late 1800's in a fictitious west Texas town. Al Frisch and Keven Russell, the originators and keepers of the story, are Wild West aficionados. Al wrote the screenplay and played Mr. Robbins. Keven played Garvey and will attend the Premiere on April 23 in Memphis.
At least one time on set, an actor thought a line sounded awkward and asked if he could say something more modern. Al would light into that person with a rant that could be heard back at base station, and Stephen the director would have to mediate and soften the blow. But the point was made: Al cared about the historical accuracy of his dialogue. Also, Al's wife Sue cared about the historical accuracy of the costumes. Attention to detail is evident all throughout the movie.
Two weeks ago, Keven watched the new Vengeance Trail, version 2.0 if you will. Here's what he said:
The only issues I see, and don't know if they can be fixed now, is [some lines with hard to understand words] and in the scene when they are upstairs in town making a plan with Jim on the table and Jim says; "they stopped in front of the Sheriff's STATION," which is a modern term and he should say OFFICE instead.
Normally, this line could be fixed with a recording studio session with the actor in a process called ADR or Automated Dialogue Replacement. Since the actor is no longer available, and would likely sound differently all these years later, I would collect thirty seconds of the character speaking in a similar tone from the same scene hopefully, as a voice sample, and upload it into a voice cloning software like PlayHT.
Then I would type in the new line of dialogue and do a comparison. The software gives multiple tries with the same line of dialogue, for different speaking rhythms, and now they've added emotions you can experiment with. I would likely then swap just the word "office" for "station," but to get the rhythm right I'd type in the whole sentence in order to get the one word right. I'd might have to swap the whole phrase for it all to sound right. Fortunately, in the edit there's no lip sync to worry about.
However, in this case, I went through all the takes and found that the actor used the right word once. Solution! Swapped it.
I know PlayHT works pretty well, because I already used it in Vengeance Trail. I'm waiting to see if the writer or producers notice, lol. An editor has his tricks and secrets, just like a magician. I did discover that I had to use a voice sample of the actor speaking with the same energy. If I mixed high-emotion dialogue with low-emotion, the output would be uneven and way off. But if I matched the same emotional energy in the sample, the output was actually quite usable. BTW, I think the lip sync will give it away more than anything, because I didn't get that quite right.
So, try out Play HT for yourself!
Ian Max
