[on describing the studio conditions in which the ADR work on the Star Blazers anime series took place at] The studio was called Film Sound and was located between 41st and Lexington in New York City. It was a tiny, tiny studio. As I recall, it was only about fifteen by thirty feet. In the booth, the only things we had room for were a small table and a chair. The mic was mounted right on the table. There was a huge TV set outside the window so we could watch the time coding, the animation, the cue beats. It was really, really interesting. I had never experienced anything like that before. All that technical stuff was a real learning curve. We had to watch for the right cue, listen for the beeps in the headphones -- three beeps, and you had to start speaking where the fourth beep would have been. You had to stay in character. Our sound engineer, Jim Frederickson -- back then, we didn't have computers and nifty software packages to be able to fix things in post-production -- had to rewind the tape every time we screwed up a line. Jim had a tape of funny sound effects, and after having to rewind the tape thirteen or fourteen times, he'd know we were growing frustrated and would play one of these silly, crazy noises, like a duck quacking or a whistle, to break the tension. And on the very next take, we'd get it right. More often than not, each of us would do our section of the script, just our lines, individually. It was particularly trying, dubbing from English to Japanese, because the two languages didn't always line up -- which made for some funny ad-libbing, depending upon how long the scene ran. It was the most economical way of doing things. For a big production house like Disney or Warner Brothers, they can afford to have their entire cast sitting there, animating to the audio track. This was the reverse. There were quite a few rewrites that had to be done on the spot. You could be speaking, emoting, and the little mouth on the big TV monitor would stop moving while you still had lines to record. Or you'd finish your lines, and the little mouth would still be moving. Writers would then adjust the dialogue. To have the entire cast sitting around waiting for one of us to have our lines adjusted, they would have gone broke. It was a very small production.
