<<<  <<  -- 3 --  Gordon Rumson    'IT'S ALL LIP-SYNCHED'  --  >>  >>>

If lip-synching is the art of moving the mouth to the voice (sung or spoken) of a prerecorded performance, then virtually all of the MTV and MuchMusic videos are glaring examples of lip-synching. Perhaps no one notices, but it is impossible for a performer to change costume, position, scenery and/or location, while singing the song continuously. I mean, they're dressed up and shoot a scene, say on the streets of London, and then another on a sound stage, and then one writhing on the floor, then somewhere else and later, the engineers piece the video segments together, all to be synchronized with the musical track. But the music was recorded first. The singers hop, dance, mouth and gyrate to the prerecorded tracks for all of the visual scenes. In a word, they lip-synch for the camera. What you see is all lip-synched.

Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist and recording artist, referred to this as 'creative cheating'. As he pointed out somewhere, if you're shooting a Western no one would expect you to shoot the scenes in order -- such as the gunslinger outside the bar and then inside. Those different scenes might be shot at widely different times.

As an example of the necessity of such lip-synching, I recall a very important movie where the actors had to be rounded up again to rerecord the sound track, as the original was somehow unsatisfactory. How did they do it? Well, of course, they watched the film and respoke their lines. They lip-synched.

No one would complain of this. If the sound wasn't good the first time, then of course you have to fix it. But that is how effective the method is. Can anyone name the film I'm talking about?

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