How far lip-sync holds in French
Three synced lines out of seventeen shots in the Hors-Jeu teaser, and nobody notices. The six-word rule, and how we write around it.
7 October 2026 · voice · Hors-Jeu · dialogue
The finding
The Hors-Jeu teaser has seventeen shots. Only three show a character speaking with synced lips. The other lines are played from behind, in profile, in voice-over, or by someone listening. Nobody notices, because a dialogue film almost never shows a mouth in close-up while it speaks. Cinema has always done this; we only applied the rule more strictly.
Why French resists
The tools hold a short line, in English, on a well-lit face to camera. Move away from that and it slips: French has nasal vowels and liaisons the models know less well, a long sentence accumulates offsets, a three-quarter face loses the reading of the lips. The result is not wrong strictly speaking; it is slightly off, and that is worse, because the viewer feels it without knowing why.
The six-word rule
A synced line is six words at most, on a face to camera, in a medium close-up, with a voice recorded before the image. Beyond that, we change the shot rather than force it: the character turns away, the other person listens, the camera moves to a hand or an object, the voice carries on. The edit does the rest, and it is exactly what an editor would do with real actors.
Writing for it
The constraint is settled at the writing stage, not in production. In the shot list, every line carries the way it is played: “sync” if it fits in six words, “from behind”, “voice-over”, “reading” otherwise. Roger even has a solution of his own: anything long he has to say, he reads, glasses on. We watch his page, not his mouth.
What we keep from it
We never ask the tool for what it does badly. We write the scene so that what it does well is enough.
