What's up with the bad sound?
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Teenagers from Outer Space
tejas55 — 20 years ago(February 26, 2006 04:43 PM)
I didn't see anyone else comment on the sound. All the spoken dialogue has a tunnel sounding echo effect, which makes it really hard to understand it. I'm assuming they did this on purpose, but it really ruined the film. You don't hear this sound when there's just music playing or on other sounds. I thought at first I just got a bad dvd.
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Kevjess74 — 20 years ago(February 28, 2006 09:27 AM)
The talking in "Teenagers" sounds weird because it was recorded in advance of scenes being filmed. The actors would first record dialogue and then do acting (esp. lip moving) that was in exact sync with the audio being played as the cameras rolled. So the dialogue got double-recorded, producing an echo effect. Filmmaker Tom Graeff, determined to keep production costs as low as possible (maybe a little too determined), made sure that the dubbing for this film didn't take a lot of studio effort. He avoided the more expensive process - and filmmaking norm - of shooting the action, removing the unsuitable vocals/noise, and then dubbing in the desired sound. I wish that the prerecord-voices-before-action technique had just been for the actors who had to play the people from another world. Then, this film would be more like the classic TV mini-series "V" in that the alien characters' voices would always sound different from those of the human characters.
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HighSchoolSucks02 — 19 years ago(May 05, 2006 03:34 PM)
Lol, good one. I wish they would have hired more younger actors to play the parts of Derek, Thor and the female lead though. o_O Maybe they should do a remake. XD
Intellignece is not a privlege it's a gift, and you use it for the good of mankind. -
jimtushinski — 19 years ago(June 23, 2006 11:00 PM)
In fact, just a few scenes were pre-recorded and lip synchedprimarily the scenes with the saucer and the aliens at the beginning and the end. Several of the actors in those scenes remember speakers attached to the camera, playing the dialog from some source, probably a tape recorder. However other actors (including Dawn Anderson who plays Betty and who is in most of the film) say they never lip syched during filming and remember looping the dialogue after the film was edited.
The entire film was shot MOS (without sound) and most of it was looped by the actors in the makeshift basement studio of Gene Sterling, who played the alien Leader with an obvious fake beard. Sterling was one of the investors in the film and most likely helped operate the camera while director/producer/writer/editor Tom Graeff appeared in the role of the reporter Joe. When Graeff wasn't acting in a scene, he was operating the camera.
I've watched the film several times, paying attention to the synch and the sound and I have to admit that I don't hear the tinniness that the previous poster mentioned. The synch is damn near perfect, except in a few places (like the scene where the drunk, played by Bob Regas, sees the approaching Gargon and calls to report it).
I'm writing a book on Graeff and the making of Teenagers and have found that there are a lot of "urban legends" associated with the story that have little basis in fact.
The real story is even more interesting than the legends.