Producing English Dubs

Just what does a "dubbing producer" do anyway?

My first post was a walkthrough of the dubbing casting process, where I discussed how productions start from hundreds, sometimes thousands of names, and land on a final pick. For this second (self-indulgent) entry, I want to zoom out and talk more generally about how dubbing productions come together, focused on the role of a producer. (Hey, that's me!)¹

The term “producer” is one of those Hollywood concepts that can mean both anything and nothing. The ‘producer’ on a TV show or film could be the creative lead, like the director or showrunner. ‘Producer’ could also be an operations-oriented role, managing the day-to-day of the film and hiring the crew, like a line producer. At the same time, ‘Producer’ might simply refer to a major investor on the project, someone who’s merely financing the production, but with no involvement in the actual filmmaking.

I’ll first discuss the role in general terms for the dubbing/voiceover context before digging into the details.

The Basics

In dubbing, you’ll most often hear the term ‘dubbing producer’ used in one of two ways: either for studio producers or for client producers. On the studio side, while this term sometimes refers to someone with creative responsibilities, it most often is a fancified job title for the studio’s project manager, the person who runs the daily operations on a project. This role is more logistics and scheduling than anything else, tasked with keeping production on-track and serving as the link between the client and internal teams. They might start the morning in a meeting with one client, and then troubleshoot a talent booking issue in the afternoon. While each studio works differently, it’s fairly common to have studio producers/project managers² work alongside the creative team more as a coordinator than as a member. Any studio-side creative work is then handled by a freelancer or a distinct creative role focused on one component of the dub, such as an adaptation supervisor or in-studio casting lead, rather than the title at-large.

Clients, which is to say, ‘the company paying for the dub,’ vary wildly in how each likes to handle dub work.³ On one end of the spectrum, a company might only provide the recording studio a schedule and materials, and call it a day, leaving everything to the studio’s discretion. At my previous job, one major streaming service’s ‘dubbing producer’ came to the studio only once a year, and only for an hour, electing to stay elusive outside of a few casting approvals.

On the other end of things, a client might be heavily involved, insisting on signing-off on any number of decisions, big and small. These more active “hands-on” clients will often, though not always, select one person as their representative throughout the process. And for a process with hands-on client involvement, that means this person, this “producer,” ends up deciding or signing-off on many, maybe nearly all, of the creative choices made on the project.

Both approaches carry risks. An active client might be a critically useful resource on a project, such as for a long-running franchise with many moving parts. If you have a producer connected to the original creators, you might be privy to extra context that strengthens performances. But an active client might create all manner of issues. They could end up causing significant delays, by virtue of slow decisions or confusing direction, or slow down production with their interventions to the point of dragging quality down. They could also simply have bad ideas, as there’s no guarantee an active client will be helpful in the room.⁴ Client producers may be knowledgeable about the show, or they might be, on account of their particular company, closer to a suit than a creative.

On the flip side, a passive client may end up with a product containing serious defects, possibly obvious errors that could’ve been prevented with minimal oversight. But being hands-off means the studio has maximum flexibility in creating what they want to create unencumbered. No corporate minions overruling the creatives. If a studio team can work well together and knows what’s needed, this might result in the best possible outcome. It’s an option that’s high-risk, high-reward.

A Tale of Two Monitors

Let’s take a brief intermission. Imagine for a moment you’ve been hired to be a voice director on a cool project. Congratulations! You must become, in a short amount of time, a subject matter expert on the IP and get up to speed on a project typically already in-progress. But hey, that’s the fun part!

You get to your first recording session at the start of the week, say, 9am sharp for Monday morning. You get coffee from the studio’s green room with cream that probably expired a month ago, having just beat traffic to arrive on-time. You open the calendar on your phone and see your session is a big one: the main character! Just that, sorry- itty bitty detail, the production team wants you to get through three episodes all in one-go because they’ve budgeted way too conservatively.

The engineer enters the room with the actor. If it's an in-studio session, they’re probably running a few minutes late. If it’s a remote session, since it’s a 9am session, they only just rolled out of bed and are in their home booth in pajamas. It takes another ten minutes to troubleshoot the remote recording software, because someone decided it was a good idea to patch it over the weekend.

You give the actor as quick a rundown as you can, with the clock ticking in your head, the due date that’s been hammered into you by every production person you’ve spoken to at the studio since you got hired. Every second spent giving this character overview is a second the actor isn’t recording and you’re not making progress. After five minutes, you decide that’s surely good enough, and send the actor into the booth to record, or if they’re remote, have them turn on their remote backup (cue additional lag time since they it’s 9am and their cat’s clawing at the door for breakfast). More time is needed for some testing, maybe the mic is too short/tall, or the ProTools session wasn’t set-up right.

For every moment of the recording, you are staring at at least two monitors, one that displays picture (meaning the video) and the other that shows the script.⁵ After each take, you’re trying to listen to the playback of the actor’s performance and the engineer’s feedback regarding sync. If you’re a more experienced director, you might occasionally glance at the engineer’s computer. Steal that breath, keep this one, you say, pointing at a purple track and a bluish-purple one, no, the other bluish-purple one, not quite sure which take is which. After listening to your options, ‘shopping around’ as we say, you take the first half of take 3 and, uh, second half of take 1- wait, actually that doesn’t fit, let’s try second half of take 2, but you’ll need to steal a “t” from another take- wait, would that still be grammatically correct? I think it fits, but he said the name a bit wrong. Err, well, who’s going to notice… right?

For every line, you consult the adapter’s notes and alternate line versions. If something doesn’t work right for sync, you might consult the translation to double-check. For an established franchise, there might be vocabulary term sheets to refer to. Wait, was the actor’s performance really that husky in S1? Since it’s day one, the studio hasn’t prepared a reference bank yet. Uh, crap, the engineer just flagged a technical issue with the last take that finally worked. You need a safety pass.

Ding! New email in your inbox. Your other project, which is recording in two days, by the way, just emailed you about a sick actor who can’t show up for at least a few weeks; that team needs an answer on a voice-match by noon.

Tick, tick, tick.

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The average dubbing voice director is balancing ten spinning plates all at once. They try their best every session to direct a nuanced performance that sounds like real, natural conversation between two people, in a process that involves only a single actor recording at a time.⁶ They do this under enormous time pressure exerted by the studio and their very human desire to be hired back again. And these are no mere inconveniences. Studios face very real economic burdens given the thin margins of dubbing. Making mistakes invites legitimate risk to the production, so studios tend to be aggressively conservative with their schedules.

To say a director’s work is a challenge is an understatement.

Against this backdrop, my role as a dubbing producer is to be both partner, providing guidance or direction, helping sustain focus for a sometimes-frazzled creative team, and a (hopefully benevolent) scrutineer, holding the studio accountable and ensuring quality expectations are met. Left on their own, a studio’s natural instinct is for speed over all things, and sloppy work over polished, carefully crafted performances. My job is to say “I know we’re under this time-pressure, so let’s focus on spinning-plate number 4,” or “there’s no need to rush, so let’s do it again until we’re happy with it,” or “you’re stressing about the wrong thing, plate 1 and 2 aren’t as important.”

While the week-to-week work is described in more detail below, the higher-level function is ensuring a great creative team is set-up for success to make great dubs. On any show, I’m there to ask questions, prod the team to think again if we run into something unusual, or consider another take on an issue, provide guidance, and step-in when necessary, always ensuring there’s an extra pair of eyes (and hands) to catch that tenth plate before it shatters.

The Week-to-Week

In practice, this means my ‘typical’ week looks different depending on how many shows I’m on and the nature of my involvement. Let’s take, for example, a theoretical high-profile show, where I plan to be heavily involved.⁷

Pre-Production

At the start of a project, I’ll review any available early materials and from there make a decision, in part discussing with other stakeholders, which studio should handle the show. If I have a specific creative team in mind, I’ll ask the studio to hire them. For all titles, I’m either directly asking the studio to hire a particular resource, or signing off on a suggestion if my first choice is unavailable.

From there, I’ll then set-up time with the studio to go over the title at a high-level and provide initial thoughts on my level of involvement and how to handle any show-specific challenges. For example, if a show that’s originally French has a lot of German and Italian spoken by some characters, should those moments be dubbed into English too? Should they be re-dubbed in those languages by our English cast (for voice consistency)? Or, should we simply “pull” the original into the dub and subtitle it instead?

The next thing that typically happens is the casting process, which is often running parallel with adaptation. My full breakdown of how casting works is here. By this point, I’ve usually created video audition materials myself before sides get sent out. In other words, I choose which scenes will be used to test the actors, and whether we’ll do any chemistry tests. For TWST, I created a chemistry test for Ace and Deuce—they needed to sound good as a pair since they’re often in the same scene together.

Adaptation

In the on-camera world, content executives usually review draft scripts submitted on greenlit shows. For dubbing, the story and substance has already been set by the original creators, so my review of the adaptation—which is our word for the ‘recording-ready’ scripts used for dubbing—is focused more on things like whether the dialogue feels natural, whether it appropriately captures the characters as they are in the original language, and whether we’ve properly retained consistent term usage. If it’s called a Spirit Bomb in Episode 5, it should be called that in Episode 10 too.

My personal dubbing “hot take” is that the LA market is way too permissive of low-quality adaptation and doesn’t take it seriously. Studios don’t pay writers enough and undervalue their work. There’s a tendency to think “well, all adaptations are bad, so why bother paying more.” I think that’s wrong. The adaptation, in my view, is the key to a great dub, arguably more than the casting or the direction. A good cast will be underserved by poor words, but an engaging, enjoyable script can elevate even a middling project.

To that end, I take a lot of time reviewing scripts to ensure we’re moving in the right direction. Adaptation is a tricky thing, as the adapter needs to balance (i) lip-sync, (ii) natural flow of dialogue, (iii) characterization,⁸ and (iv) consistency, among other considerations. And like my narrative earlier around the challenge of directing, adapters do all this under an equally compressed timeline.⁹

To illustrate where my role falls into all of this, let me use an example from the recently released TWST title, with a single instance from Episode 1.

In this scene, the characters are discussing the upcoming orientation for new students at Night Raven College. The character Azul overhears another character, Kalim, talking about how extravagant the opening ceremonies might be and offers to help procure those services for him if desired. Idia, a shut-in who appears only via tablet in this scene, hovers in and makes a teasing comment towards Azul about his transparent attempt to profit from Kalim’s excitement (and naiveté). The original adaptation read:

Always on that grind. Ever the opportunist, aren’t we, Azul? You’ll ingratiate yourself to anyone.

During the script review, I left a note for the adapter that, in my view, the line’s ending was missing the playfulness at the end from the Japanese, and that it felt somewhat repetitive—“ever the opportunist” and “you’ll ingratiate yourself” is kind of saying a version of the same thing twice. It’s not incorrect, but it doesn’t flow well.

The adapter addressed the first note by borrowing the Japanese’s ending to “I bow to you, Azul,” while the updated version of the bolded segment was changed to this, which is what Khoi Dao, the voice actor for Idia, initially saw on the script:

Never a moment’s rest for you. Capitalist pig, more like capitalist GOAT. I bow to you, Azul.

At the session, this was changed again. I felt the term ‘capitalist pig’ would be ill-fitting for the scene, would require duplicating the same ‘GOAT’ slang Idia used earlier in the same episode (“Azul’s the GOAT!”), and more importantly, would lose the point he was making—from the subs: “You’re even using this situation to start a new business.” I proposed a rewrite which I felt was still in-character for Idia, while incorporating the missing reference to Idia’s comment on Azul’s adaptability/sliminess.

Never a moment’s rest for you. Adapting to the new meta, GG. I bow to you, Azul.

This is a small example of how these things change over the course of a project. I work with the adapter to update the script, and then on the stage, when it’s time to record, I’ll work with the director to decide what actually makes it into the show. Adaptation tweaks are often a hundred of these tiny adjustments spread throughout the entire run of a season.¹⁰

Production

As hinted at in that last segment, once the casting and scripts are complete, we move into the recording phase of the project. Here, the studio brings in each actor, one-by-one, to record their character. I usually attend and supervise these sessions, giving notes to the director on the adaptation or performance. That’s where I might jump in to clarify something in the story the director’s having trouble with, finesse a particular moment that’s important, or ‘throw a flag’ if an error’s been made and we’re about to move on without fixing it, like mispronouncing a name or key term.

For example, there are some shows where I’ve set a directive for the project to be more naturalistic in performance and less cartoony/dubby, where a title has a more grounded feel in the original language. A lot of anime directors are used to the musicality of anime dub line reads, so it can be fairly common that I need to chime in and pull them out of that headspace. Like I said before, that’s not indicative of the quality of the director, only a reflection of the many, many things competing for their attention during a session.

Sometime mid-way through production, I will review a preliminary version of the recordings to-date. These are always incomplete, partial episodes, but it’s enough to give me an idea of how things are sounding. I’ll usually create detailed notes at this stage for pick-ups¹¹ for the director to work through before the recording for an episode is finished. Sometimes, more drastic changes happen after the pre-mix, if earlier decisions end up not working as planned, such as with casting or an adaptation choice that, with reflection, or in context with the rest of the scene now done, doesn’t work. These might be decisions I’m making independently, or signing-off on suggestions from the creative team.

The Final Mix

We’re now close to the end. With the recording complete and everything polished to a high-quality, all that’s left is the mix.

The mix is another underappreciated part of the dubbing/voiceover process. A mix, in layman’s terms, combines the dubbed dialogue with the music & effects tracks used in the original version.

The believability of a dub can rise or fall on the quality of the mixer. A mixer isn’t only adding reverb for a scene in a big room, they’re balancing how every actor sounds to ensure the dialogue can ‘breathe’ and feels as natural as the original version. One of the most obvious ‘tells’ for a dub is the way the dialogue can often sound like it’s recorded in a studio; a good mixer can help disguise the fact it’s a dub and make it feel seamless, as if it were an English original.

My involvement at this stage varies from project-to-project, but I typically will sit with the mixer and the director at an on-site mix review. This means the mixer plays through the episode, while everyone present writes down notes of anything that might need review. Once the playback is done, we go through each note one-by-one to ensure we’re happy with how everything sounds. The time for notes/fixes might be as short as 15-20 minutes if there’s not much to worry about, or as long as 3 hours, which is how long the post-playback review for TWST’s first episode took.

Notes here can address anything from the believability of the environments to the nature of a cool effect on someone’s voice. This is the last chance to address sync issues, tweak volume, and remove any extraneous sounds that weren’t fixed during the editing process (which happens right before the mix begins).

Finally, depending on the nature of the show, there may still be title-wide changes at this point if there’s something I, or the team, want to address, and there’s still time to do so. This is, after all, the last stage before the files get sent over to the Audience.

Closing Thoughts

In talking a lot about my personal involvement on a project, the last thing I want is to give the impression that the quality of a show is merely a dictate from me on-high. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Every dubbing project is the product of the hard work of an enormous team: Actors, directors, engineers, translators, spotters, adapters, editors, mixers, production coordinators, studio managers, and studio admin staff, all contribute to the project in some way.

When a dub is great, when a dub feels like it has heart, when it connects to a viewer who would never gives dubs a chance normally, it’s only because each and every person involved put their all into it.

To quote Yuken from TWST's season finale: “This is a team battle!”

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While writing up this essay has been overtly self-indulgent, my hope is you’ll be left with a better sense of the intensive creative work that goes into the dubbing process. The privilege I have as a producer is getting to see all of it, every stage, every decision, the unique interplay of ideas when a director and actor work through a scene for the first time. Even for a product that is, by its own terms, derivative, an enormous amount of care goes into every step and every second. Dubbing is hard; doing it well is harder.

With the advent of dangerous, unethical technologies in the voiceover space, it’s never been more important to shed light on the value, and the necessity of the human touch, in this important work. To share stories from one culture to another, to make it easier for our divided world to enjoy the works of artists and creatives from any background—what could be more quintessentially human?

1. As always, I’m writing this in my personal capacity, and nothing here should be construed to represent anyone’s views but mine.

2. The term “production manager/supervisor” and “studio manager” might also be used.

3. Some projects may have multiple levels of “clients,” with representatives from the distributor and licensor involved.

4. Obviously not ME, of course, I never have bad ideas.

5. Even where a studio may use a tool like VoiceQ (karaoke-for-dubbing), where the script is embedded on top of the video, it's common to have the raw script, or at least the director's personal computer, also open while recording goes on.

6. In the U.S., typically only pre-lay recordings, loop groups, and some walla work have group sessions. While not unheard of, group recording for English dubbing is rare.

7. It looks like Godzilla, but due to international copyright laws, it’s not.

8. Meaning ‘does each character sound distinct and speak with their own voice.’

9. The cheat code for adaptation is hiring Madeleine Morris, who IMO is the best anime adapter in our industry, period. Hire her here.

10. Script tweaks can frequently come from the voice director too, and to a lesser extent, the actor and engineer.

11. Pick-ups are akin to re-shoots; an actor re-does a line/scene based on a note, or a line that was missed in the original session. Notes can mean a creative note, from a producer or director, or a fix needed for technical reasons, such as mouth/nose noises or a mic hit that couldn’t be cleaned from the audio.