Remember our photo & sound exhibition
"Faces behind the Voices" in our Goethe Media Space 2018 on the art of dubbing? In Germany and other countries, foreign film & TV content is rarely subtitled but mostly presented with a voiceover. That part of the industry is now hit especially hard as production is halted and you need a professional studio space to create the work (no home office laptop sound capture here!). The German artists' union is taking a stance:
Bundesverband Schauspiel, Germany's stage, film and TV union, has come out against requests for “cloud dubbing” in place of the real thing during the coronavirus crisis.
For the Bundesverband Schauspiel (BFFS), the collaboration of dubbing actors with the directing, editing, and sound trades is a prerequisite for dubbed productions. The nationwide actors’ association said they strongly rejects home office solutions like cloud dubbing that are made without a crew.
Cloud dubbing --having dubbing actors solely perform for film and television productions from home-- lacks the direct collaboration required for productions with the indispensable trades of direction, editing, and sound. There’s also the risk that actors who get involved in cloud dubbing will find themselves on the social sidelines.
“Right now, some producers are trying to convince dubbing actors to work from their homes. The actors are then given a microphone and asked to create their voice recordings at home and upload them to the cloud. Since most don’t have professional studios at home, there’s a quality problem due to the acoustics,” explains BFFS board member Dr. Till Valentin Völger, adding, “Sadly, methods like cloud dubbing are grist for the mills of those who already think dubbing spoils films. The modus operandi shouldn’t even be called a ‘dubbed production.’
As an actor, I absolutely need feedback from the director, editor, and sound editor. If I can’t have that, I'm not just talking into a ‘cloud,’ but into nirvana. Then we aren’t doing ourselves, the consumers, and ultimately the clients any favours.”
As a number of dubbing producers have already announced, extensive measures are now being implemented to convert studios for voice recording in coordination with the medical service so that operations can be resumed. “
These measures include digital scripts, Plexiglas partitions and, of course, routine surface disinfection,” Völger reports.
“Should further restrictions become necessary, if need be so-called 'remote dubbing' is acceptable. Then, all of the trades are still involved in the dubbed productions, but at different locations. Dubbing actors are each in a separate room, editing and sound are connected remotely – but there has to be a good, clean connection and the appropriate software and hardware must be available,” says Dr. Völger, who nonetheless considers remote dubbing only an interim solution that enables productions to be dubbed at all.
The letters BFFS stand for for stage, film, television, and language. Founded in 2006, as a trade union with more than 3,500 actors, the BFFS is now the largest national actors’ organization and the largest professional association in the German film, television, and theatre scene. The BFFS represents the professional as well as the trade union interests of actors in Germany. It aims to improve or create the cultural, social, political, legal, collective bargaining, and social framework conditions that protect, preserve, and promote the unique acting profession and also take the special living and working situation of the artists who practice this profession into account.
image: Jutta Brendemuehl, Goethe-Institut
