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Vancouver Olympic opening ceremonies will feature lip-synching, not dubbing
By: Nick Patch, THE CANADIAN PRESS
11/02/2010 4:30 PM | Comments: 2
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VANCOUVER, B.C. - Two years after piped-in vocals from a seven-year-old songbird touched off a controversy at the Beijing Games, Vancouver Olympic organizers are hoping to avoid a similar scandal by being clear about plans for the 2010 opening ceremonies.
Yes, VANOC says, performers will lip-synch at Friday’s festivities. But they’re also quick to point out the distinction between that method and the dubbing that inspired such outrage in Beijing.
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In 2008, a button-cute nine-year-old girl’s stirring rendition of “Ode to the Motherland” was among the highlights of the extravagant opening ceremonies.
But when it was revealed that the vocal was actually delivered by another child - the seven-year-old, tucked away off-screen because producers didn’t consider her telegenic - newspapers around the world condemned the fakery.
World headlines were universally negative.
“The counterfeit Games: designed to look good from every angle.”
“Olympic karaoke.”
“Hoax! Made in China.”
One commentator called it “the great Beijing lip-synch switcheroo.”
But David Atkins, executive producer of the Vancouver opening ceremonies, points out that what happened in China was actually dubbing, not lip-synching - the distinction being that lip-synching involves a singer mimicking a backing track of his or her own voice, while dubbing means misrepresenting someone else’s voice as the singer’s own.
“Most live events are performed probably 90 per cent synched,” said David Atkins, executive producer of the Vancouver opening ceremonies.
“In other words, performers are miming their guitar playing or they’re miming their drumming or they’re miming their singing in some cases and that’s been the case for a very long time.”
And yet instances where lip-synchers have been exposed have still often incited outrage or ridicule from the public and media.
In 2004, Ashlee Simpson was humiliated when producers on “Saturday Night Live” queued up the wrong vocal track as she took the stage to “sing.” Flustered, she made some exaggerated dance moves before exiting the stage, later blaming the incident on a case of acid reflux.
Britney Spears faced a controversy in Australia this past fall when patrons were angry that large portions of her show were lip-synched. An Australian politician was even quoted saying prior to the show that the Sydney crowd would not tolerate a “Mickey Mouse performance” from Spears.
Some were similarly upset when the NFL revealed that the flawless performances delivered by Jennifer Hudson and Faith Hill at 2009’s Super Bowl were both lip-synched to tracks recorded in advance.
And four years ago, Elton John blasted Madonna because he believed she lip-synched on her “Reinvention” tour, saying that “anyone who lip-synchs in public onstage when you pay 75 Pounds to see them should be shot.”
The thorny issue already arose at these Games, when the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra turned down an invitation to supply music for the opening ceremonies because VANOC wanted other musicians to mime the performance during the show.
Lip-synching at live events is not, however, pandemic.
A representative for the Juno Awards told The Canadian Press that the show does not employ lip-synching in any form, and that the show’s performers are not accompanied by backing tracks.
“The Junos are 100 per cent live,” said Juno spokesman Chris McDowall.
“No lip-synching at all.”
Still, Atkins insists that lip-synching is the standard for most live television events, when the stakes are so high for producers that a spotty microphone connection, sore throat or botched lyric could prove disastrous.
“From a musical point of view ... it would be impossible to have every single sound and instrument that’s sent out to the broadcast there on the stage,” he explained.
“Everyone will be performing live in the stadium and performing vocally live but we always pre-record their voices to ensure the quality of the broadcast. And if something happens, within a fraction of a second we can flip from live to pre-recorded.”
In Beijing, the artifice tainted the otherwise spectacular ceremonies. In addition to the fresh-faced impostor singer, the awe-inspiring fireworks display on television was also revealed to have been enhanced using computer graphics.
But Atkins stresses that this is not the same issue.
“It was a very different situation there,” he said.
“The little girl that would have performed the anthem, had they not changed her, she would have been synching to her voice, it would have been lip-synch but it would have been her voice. That’s just a contemporary piece of technology that’s been part and parcel of broadcasting for 15, 20 years.
“But the issue that’s important is the honesty around, are you hearing that person singing? And in Beijing it wasn’t, the girl that was seen singing wasn’t the girl whose voice you were hearing.”
-With files from Stephanie Levitz in Vancouver.
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