Subject: The "backwards" speech & other effects
From: dmb@wam.umd.edu (David M. Baggett)
Date: 1990-04-20, 08:50
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks

In article <14984@s.ms.uky.edu> jkolasa@ms.uky.edu (James Kolasa) writes:
> >                                                               I did hear
> >someone else say she thought the portion was simply aired in reverse.  
> >Anyone else hear this?  Clarification is desired.

The speech was not simply played backwards.  If you'll go back and listen
again, you'll see (hear?) that you can still make out the words.  If each
word had just been played backwards it would sound like complete
gibberish.

It sounds like they took each word and randomly reversed segments here and
there.  Not too many though.  They could have done this with a sampler
or by doing the Beatles' Mr. Kite thing of cutting the tape and splicing
it back together in funny ways.

Everything looked jerky during the dream sequence.  At first I thought
this was just caused by the weird strobe lighting, but in retrospect I
think they just cut (tiny) pieces out of the film here and there and
spliced them back in.  In other words, the splicing they did to change
the audio also changed the video.  (But since humans don't see as
"quickly" as they hear, the effect is more subtle.)  Take a careful look 
at the dancing.

Did anyone think that Cooper looked like a wax figure in that scene,
or was it just my TV?

Dave Baggett
dmb@cscwam.umd.edu