The Eagle film (formerly to be called The Eagle of the Ninth) has excellent fight and battle scenes, it is suggested on Twitter:

“I was doing ADR work  on The Eagle of the Ninth– some of those battle sequences are jaw-droppingly good …” (Nils Hognestad on Twitter)

I have learned since posting this originally that ADR  stands for ‘Automated Dialogue Replacement’.  I now understand from a quick tutorial from Ben at Toledo Productions that it is a process where an actor in a recording booth stands in front of a screen playing their performance, and then re-speaks the vocals in time with the picture.  It is useful if you want to change the sense of a line of dialogue, if the film-makers have found that there was some issue with the sound recording on the day, or, ‘most fascinating’ (says Ben, and I agree) if you are changing a line, perhaps to one that fits the actor’s mouth movement (which is easier if the actor is far away).  ADR also lets you record new lines for use when a character is off screen.

The easier part, apparently, is recording the lines. The harder part  is processing and degrading the clean studio recordings so they match those made on the day the scene was shot.  Good ADR work should, ultimately, not be at all noticeable.  Bad ADR is very distracting …

Perhaps like any set of technical terms, many of the meanings of film industry abbreviations and acronyms are steeped in ambiguity.  MOS is for when a scene is shot without any sound recorded to go with it – and it has been explained variously  as ‘Muted Optical Strip’, ‘Mute On Sound’ and, perhaps the most enjoyable, ‘Mit Out Sound’…!

(Thank you to Ben at Toledo Productions).