Crash Course on Welcome to the South Film 101
Benvenuti al Sud (Welcome to the South) is a remake of the 2008 French film Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’tis. Anyone in Europe knows there are many contrasting differences between any northern and southern towns within a country. Similar to the French version, Benvenuti al Sud is one of Italy’s modern-day cinematic treasures that can make any northerner or southerner temporarily forget about the constant rivalry and be left cracking up for hours.
The film features, Alberto, (the main protagonist) who is in charge of a post office in the small town of Brianza in northern Italy, and in order to please his wife Silvia, who wants to move to Milan, he is willing to do anything—even pretending to be disabled—to get on the promotion list and get the job in the big city. Unfortunately, he rats himself out and is then punished with every northerner’s worst nightmare: being transferred to the SOUTH, more specifically, to a town near NAPOLI. Like any tourist or northerner, Alberto naturally expects the worst: a violent town, aggressive southerners, dangerous roads filled with waste, and “slacking” colleagues. Initially he goes back home to the North every weekend, but the more time he spends with his new colleagues (Mattia the postman, Maria the postal clerk, and unforgettable old men), the more he falls in love with the southern life.
The Original Version
My Final Dubbed Version
Project Overview
I dubbed this movie trailer from Italian and Neapolitan dialect (dialect from Napoli) into English. You may be asking yourself, “Well how different is the Neapolitan dialect from Italian?” and the answer is: VERY! It is a dialect full of shortened words, sarcastic tones, expressions that can be conveyed through single elongated vowel sounds, and uplifting jokes that are very specific to Naples’ culture. Overall, the video is two minutes and twenty-one seconds of pure sarcasm and southern-based humor, and in order to convey those subtle jokes, I needed to find the most suitable voice talent for the job. Ideally, in the professional world, I would have access to a voice bank full of talent with professional experiences, but for the purpose of this project I settled for the next best thing: MIIS students.
Voice-Acting Talent Selection: Differentiating the Northern Italian Accent from the Southern Italian Accent
When selecting this movie trailer as my final project I already had some people’s voices in mind. In fact, the first voice I recorded was that of the main character, Alberto. In the film, Alberto and his wife are the only two people that have a Northern Italian accent. It is important to note that there are many different types of Northern Italian accents. For example, the Emilian, the Ligurian, the Venetian, the Piedmontese, and, in this case, the Lombard (because Lombardy is the general area where Alberto and his wife are from). The general reason for this, is because before Italy’s unification in 1861, the country was divided into many different smaller regions, each speaking their own local languages. For more information about this, please check out this video: Northern Italian or Souther Italian – Accent Challenge. Overall, there are about 226 local languages in Italy, and for untrained ears, these dialects sound the same; however, in the case of the Lombard dialect, this simply means that they typically pronounce every single letter as well as every vowel in an “open” manner, and have a very specific, song-like way of speaking. Thus, to emphasize this difference in dialect, I decided to have two Brazilians who speak English with their Portuguese accent occasionally piercing through, represent the couple from the north, while having everyone else who represents the south speak English without any sort of accent aside from each voice-talent’s general way of speaking.
Voice-Acting Talent Recordings
The recording process was one of my favorite moments while working on this project. I reached out to each voice talent individually to have a master plan of which MIIS students I wanted to dub for which characters, and depending on their availability, I would confirm them to be certain characters. Once I met my voice talent in person, I obtained my desired vocal recordings by showing each of them the script (the transcription and translation of the original video– along with many of my translations modifications to make the recordings flow better ) as well as the various clips in sequential order. Then, I would tell them what kinds of emotions or feelings they should tap into, as well as letting them witness my personal interpretation, facilitating the imitation game, and generating the desired voice I envisioned for each phrase. The talent would repeat after me (sometimes once was enough, other times it took more tries) and all was recorded on my iPhone using the default voice recorder app. The recordings took place in small rooms varying from interpretation booths, to my kitchen living room, to small study rooms, depending on what type of effect I wanted. This was one of my favorite parts simply because, during each recording, I would see the same thing happen to each of the talents: first, the occasional worry and mistakes; then, the more I guided them, the more they tapped into the desired state of mind, and what was once worry and anxiety soon make complete confidence as I saw these talents transforming into their characters.
Challenges
There were many challenges throughout this project. The first and main challenge was recreating the Original Soundtrack (OST) from scratch. Usually, there is an available OST file online; however, there was nothing for this movie trailer. Thus, let the troubleshooting games begin! After hours of research, I found that the best FREE option was to perform a simple trick in Audacity, overlay that with the original sound track, and then download various other missing sound effects from Youtube, recreating the ultimate OST.
How to Create an OST From Scratch
- Extract the MP3 file from your corresponding video
Step one is to extract the MP3 file so that it can be accessed quickly and used to generate your new audio file. There are many different safe and reliable sites to convert Youtube or Vimeo videos to MP3: Apowersoft, Video Grabber, and VidToMP3 are a few options to keep in mind for future reference. - Download Audacity (if you don’t already have it)
Once you have extracted the MP3 file, you need to download Audacity and open up the file in the new opens source, cross-platform audio software. You can simply drag and drop the audio file into the gray space and then the corresponding waveforms will appear (as shown below).
- Splitting the Stereo Track
As of now, the main track is classified as a Stereo track, and in order to create an OST file, it is necessary that you split it to have two separate tracks. To do this, click on the name of the track. In this case, “Benvenuti al Sud,” on the left control panel below the downward facing green triangle. The following options then appear, and you are looking for “Split Stereo Track”.
- Now you should see two separate tracks, as intensified by the two separate control panels on the left at the beginning of each audio file. By selecting on “Split Stereo Track” you have essentially split the track so that the top track becomes the noise that will flow into the left headphone, while the bottom track is that which flows into the right headphone.
- “Invert Effect”
Now select the bottom track by clicking anywhere in the left control panel where there is gray space. Once the track is highlighted with a surrounding yellow link, then you know you have selected the track correctly. Be careful when selecting because it is very easy to click near the gray space and accidentally change some of the current modalities. Once the bottom track, and only the bottom track, is highlighted now go, select “Invert” from the “Effects” menu, as shown below.
- And voilà, your bottom track is inverted! Don’t Believe Me? Zoom In!
From a human eye point of view, the bottom track will look exactly the same, as if nothing happened. However, what this effect does, is invert the selected audio by 180 degrees. Thus, if you zoom in, look very carefully. The bottom audio file has been completely flipped and is now mirroring the top track. Essentially, once you have split the tracks and applied the invert effect on one of the two, this eliminates the sounds and leaves you with sound effects and the music. In other words, anything except the voices– perfect for dubbing. With this simple effect, you have now cancelled out all of the spoken dialogue and can begin editing… or can you?
Unfortunately, the Invert Effect does not always eliminate all of the desired sounds while maintaining the background music. This becomes particularly important when working with videos that have many a lot of ambience and sound effects.
Sound Effects: Preservation vs Recreation
Thus, the following are sound effects that were too hard to recreate due to them being created in the exact moment the shot was filmed. Thus the following sound effects were ones I extracted from the original and added them to my OST.
Preserved Sounds
1) Tipping Over the Wheelchair
2) Soccer Ball Shattering the Glass Window
3) Final Chaos Scene
Recreated Sounds
1) Pigeons flying in Piazza del Duomo
2) Clicking of Heels when Maria says “Good morning everyone”
3) Sound of the Mediterranean Sea
4) Moped driving through the streets
My Workarounds
My main workaround for this was to unlink the audio track from the original video so that changes could be made to the the audio without altering any of the crucial frames. I kept the entire original MP3 in A1 in Premiere Pro as a guide to place all my own talent recordings. Once all of the recordings were placed in the correct places, I then began deleting all of the parts of the original spoken audio and preserving certain isolated sound effects and then combined them with my other tracks to form one original track. As for the music, I personally downloaded the four different music tracks that are used in the trailer, and manually mashed them up in Audition and Adobe Premier Pro. I placed it in a different audio layer and perfectly aligned it with the previously downloaded Invert Effect MP3 and, when played at the same time, it created one complete track (which is what you hear in my dubbed version of the trailer). From this point on, it all became a crazy 7-layer audio puzzle. It was only a matter of finding and downloading various sound effects from Youtube and adding them at various moments to the clip to remain as true as possible to the original sound effects which were lost during the Invert Effect.
- V1 – The first blue line is the Video Footage
- A1 – All that is left from the original MP3. In other words, the blue you see are the original sound effects I preserved to stay true to the original trailer.
- A2 – The Invert Effect-applied MP3 which I exported from Audacity. Notice that I only kept some parts and then combined it with A5, which is the mashup I created of the music track.
- A3 – Some of the voice-acting-talent recordings (Dubs). The first two blue segments are Alberto’s voice (with applied phone effect) followed by three more segments which represent the conversation between him and his wife in Piazza del Duomo.
- A4 – Other voice-acting-talent recordings. They are on a separate line because these lines happen at the very end of another recording or overlapping.
- A5 – My personal mashup of different musical clips that, when mixed with A1, achieve the same output as the original background music in the trailer. The four songs I used are: “Cilento latino,” ” O mia Bella madunina,” “David di Donatello,” and “Tema.”
- A6 – Mix between sound effects downloaded from youtube (preserved vs recreated sound effects) and music bits that I cut from A5. The first three orange highlighted boxes are a duplicated sound effect of “Piazza del Duomo- Milan“. I duplicated it because the clip was short and added some filters to make the noise resemble that of the original.
- A7 – More sound effects. For example, in this case, I used “Birds Wings Flapping HD” sound effect, and duplicated it because they fly up close twice.
Behind the Scenes
Check out my video below to see how all of the segments come into play in specific moments and compare them simultaneously with the video preview.
- And if you are asking yourself what these gray circles connected by lines mean, they represent all the instances when I faded sound in and out to make the whole OST as smooth and connected as possible, just like the original. For more information regarding this, please check out “How to Fade Music In and Out in Premiere Pro” on Youtube.
Lastly, did you spot the AI-generated one-liner?
I’ll leave you a hint… here’s the phrase associated with the sound. Check it out!
A Special Thank You to all of the Talent!
Cast in Order of Appearance:
