Subject: Re: The "backwards" speech & other effects
From: gary@oak.circa.ufl.edu (Nija/Pwcca/Manitou)
Date: 1990-04-21, 12:16
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks

In article <1990Apr20.155028.5078@wam.umd.edu>, dmb@wam.umd.edu (David M. Baggett) writes:
> >In article <14984@s.ms.uky.edu> jkolasa@ms.uky.edu (James Kolasa) writes:
>> >>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.
 
  It's nothing as complex as that... David Lynch simply had them move and walk
backwards, as well as saying their lines backwards (phonetically). Probably
took a hell of a lot of time... Anyways, once that was done, the film was ran in
reverse when put on videotape, so that the result was the eerie voices and
movements... 
  While this sounds rather hard, a much more complex sequence in a movie was
done in exactly the same way, except the reversed speech was meant to sound like
german so the acters just spoke a sort of inversed mock-German... It was in
the movie "Top Secret", done by the same producers and writers of "Airplane!"
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