Dialogue Editing

CHAPTER 14
Conformations
“But they told me that the picture was locked!”
You’ve been editing the dialogue for four weeks, and you’ve made thousands
of detailed, interrelated edits and countless fragile overlaps. Knowing that
the fi lm was locked fi ve weeks ago, you confi dently built your editorial house
of cards. Now you learn that the director and picture editor have made hundreds
of “small” changes. “Don’t worry,” they tell you, “most of the changes
are just a couple of frames each.” You weigh the relative merits of poison and
jumping off the roof.
It’s much more common to run into postlock changes than to work on a movie
whose structure is set in stone. Changes happen, and it’s unimportant why.
To survive these annoying reshuffl ings of your editorial deck, you can’t take
them as a personal affront; they’re just part of making movies. When you get
the “Oh, by the way” news that the picture editor has turned the fi lm upside
down yet the temp dub is still scheduled for Thursday, quietly throw your
brief tantrum, then come up with a plan.
The Conformation Defi ned
The process of matching sound sessions, whether dialogue, SFX, BG, Foley,
or music, to an altered picture edit is known as a conformation, colloquially
a “confo.” Since picture editors have been making eleventh-hour changes for
years, there’s a well-developed system for communicating those changes to
the editors and assistants in the sound department.
Key to this communication are the change notes (see Figure 14-1)—detailed,
step-by-step instructions on what to remove, lengthen, insert, or move. If you
start at the top of the list and follow all of the instructions, odds are good
you’ll end up with the desired results. If you try to outsmart the change list,
combining steps or skipping others, you’ll probably run into trouble.
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