Lip-sync is the Pandora's Box of video making. The commissioner's succubus. It will come and torment your sleep, raping your dreams. It will fill your life with burdensome toil and sickness.
It starts on the shoot. Your eagle eyes are glued to the monitor. ACTION. You feel a bit jittery. Shouldn't of had that cup of tea so soon after the last one. Fuck, does the lip-sync look out? Hushed:
"Von does the lip-sync look weird to you?"
"Sorry bruv, hard to say. There's a bit of a delay on that monitor."OK. I'm sure it's fine. This must be their eighth video or some shit. I can't even remember. It'll be fine. If they can't sing along to their own songs by now, we're fucked anyway. CUT.
I should be professional and make sure though.
"Wow. That was amazing. Probably one of the best takes I've ever seen."
"You really think so?"
"Yeah man. That was gold. Unbelievable."
"It wasn't too serious?"
"No it was perfect. Just remember to actually sing the words out loud. You know. Don't mime. Great though. Really good."
Safe. Job done.
Only it isn't, because in reality it's impossible to tell whether an artist is hitting their sync on the day of the shoot. And by making an issue of it, you only succeed in making them feel more self-conscious and more likely to over-enunciate the words as they sing. And that's bad.
The true horror starts to unfold once you get into the edit. A link to the first cut hits your inbox. The relief of the video not being shit gives you a momentary feeling of elation. You watch it a few more times. Yeah. I'm wicked. But then you start to falter. A nagging doubt creeps in, numbing your stomach, working its way down to your bowels, slowly prompting the question you never wanted to ask: does it look out of sync?
You have just opened Pandora's Box. And now you're going to pay.
Dread takes hold. Wait. Hang on. Hang the fuck on. It must be because I'm streaming the video. Jesus. It's the tinternet's fault. Fuck you tinternet. I'm on top of this shit. Phone the producer:
"Dude, I need a DVD of the cut. I don't care dude. Get him out of the meeting. I really need a DVD. Great. Thanks."The bike arrives a few hours later. You tear open the jiffy bag and load the DVD. Cunt. Why doesn't this shit ever work? Nothing fucking works in here. That's what pisses me off. Phone facilities.
"Pete, my DVD player's broken again. It just really pisses me off that nothing ever works."
"Have you tried putting it on AV2 - the DVD channel?"
"I didn't actually try that yet."
Yeah whatever. AV2. I knew that. Chat bout. You get the controller, switch the channel and hit play. No. No. No. No. Cunt bags. The video still looks a bit out of sync. Does it? Just slightly. And not all the way through - only in certain sections. You watch it again. Segments of performance that seemed to be in sync before, now look like they're out of sync. By the third viewing, the artist looks as though they're singing along to a different fucking song.
Maybe it's just me. Once you start studying it, really scrutinizing it, the lip-sync in any video can seem out. I'm tired. Maybe it's a hallucination - a lip-sync mirage. I need a second opinion from someone on the Taiwanese marketing sweatshop floor.
"Yo dude, come in here for a sec and look at this video."AV2 it up.
"What do you think?"
"I like it."
"Did it seem out of sync to you?"
"Now you come to mention it, the lip-sync did seem a bit funny."Right now I want to kill you. Lots of times. The phone rings. The L.E.D display flashes BOARDROOM. Great. Just what I fucking need.
"That link you sent is out of sync. You need to fix it."Yeah cheers. Like I didn't know that I need to fix it. This is it man. I'm going to start crying.
Yep. Unfortunately this is how it goes sometimes. There are videos that I've commissioned that I can't even watch because all I see is a big, fat, meaty mouth filling the screen, uncontrollably gabbling the words of the song out of time with the music.
My advice to all wannabe Pandoras is simple: bitch, don't open it.
