It is worth mentioning a couple if interesting alternatives to traditional dubbing. As technology reaches greater sophistication, the realistic synthesis of the human voice, various text-to-speech-to-text applications, and accurate motion detection cease to be ideas of academic fancy. YouTube and other social media platforms introduce possibilities for democratization of this otherwise closed industry.
Video Rewrite is a program developed at New York University’s Media Research Lab.
It maps the original actor’s lip movements onto newly recorded dialogue by re-animating the mouth movements. Video Rewrite’s website shows examples of a character mouthing words that were never spoken in the original recording.
IRCAM’s Respoken and Super-VP Trax are tools for voice transformation intended for animation, dubbing, and games. With these, a single actor can impersonate several characters of different genders, age, and physical appearance.
Bad Lip Reading is a YouTube channel that takes dubbing and comedy to the next level: the original dialogue is replaced by words that match exactly every lip movement and sound, but have nothing to do whatsoever with the original context.
follerie.com is a French Canadian site containing parodies of classic TV shows. The humour is juvenile, but the final result is slick.
X Shreds is a meme featuring music videos with new sound overdubbed with perfect lip sync, and with hilarious results. An alternative form of comedy involving subtitling new text over an existing foreign dialogue went viral with this scene from Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2004 historical drama Downfall.
The Open Dubbing Project (ODP) was introduced by Ms. Yujin Lee at the TEDx Seoul conference in 2009. It simply states that media internationalization need not be under the control of corporations and closed professional circles. While most media is owned by someone somewhere, there is no law against producing derivative media in parallel, that is, audio commentaries, dubs, alternative soundtracks, etc., as long as they are independent from the copyright-protected source. Rifftracks is one successful example of this.