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Filmmakers may come across situations where they are stuck with recorded sound they can't afford to redo. These filmmakers may have had the gain too high, the microphone too close, or the recording media was bad; but sometimes you need to make the best of a bad situation. If you have dialogue that doesn't sound clean, see if you can change the movie to make it usable. The ideas that follow are mostly ridiculous remedies for poor sound. Even though they may never literally come in handy, hopefully they will get you thinking of ways to use what you already have.

Robot Speak

The dialogue could be said by a robot. It could be as simple as a computer like in Star Trek that talks to you anywhere, it doesn't need a body and be seen. If it's a conversation, they could have it with the robot computer and you could save the scene. No matter how poor the dialogue sounds it can be filtered to believably sound like a robot voice.

Bad Dream

Anything that happens in a bad dream can sound bad and make sense. I remember some "Twin Peaks" scenes that had distorted manipulated sound and since it was in Agent What-His-Name's dream it was no big deal. You could even tweak the audio more to make it sound scarier or weirder.

Energy Field

This won't come it handy often but what if the character was speaking through some force field that distorted voices. This will take additional processing, but the good news is that your poor dialogue can be used without anyone being the wiser.

Not Breathing Air

Have you ever spoken right after inhaling helium. Your voice goes up in pitch. There's no reason why the air on another planet might not do something like that to the voice of your character. Sound travels differently and thus sounds different to our ears depending on the gas it travels on. Pitch up or down the dialogue and put the movie on another planet, it's either that or have a movie on Earth where you look like an amateur.

Bad Phone Reception

Maybe you can reshoot the scene without sync sound and have a conversation happen over a phone instead of in person. Use only reaction shots with filtered dialogue to sound like it's coming over the phone. Maybe one phone has bad reception and you can even cut out some parts as happens when you speak on phone with bad connections.

Speaker Phone Conversation

If it's a monologue a character gives to a bunch of other characters then maybe you can take him out of the scene and cut to a speaker phone and pretend it was coming from there the whole time. Luckily speaker phones sound worse than poorly recorded dialogue so you can make this work with minimal sound processing.

Voicemail Message

If it's just small bits of exposition throughout maybe you can shoot some scenes where a character calls his or her voicemail and that's when we hear it. It's better than the movie being confusing because you forgot to let us know the something important.

Through CB Radio

If this dialogue is delivered through a walkie-talkie or CB radio then quality won't be an issue. These two-way radios have notoriously poor sound quality so you can fit your poorly recorded dialogue in there and might even need a little more dirtying up. Cut to reaction shots only with the crackly voice of the other party over it.

Intercom

If there's an intercom in the house or the apartment where your movie is set you can have the dialogue be said over it. That way all you need shoot is a cut away of the intercom's speaker and cut to reaction shots of the characters as normal.

These are mostly not usable. Ludicrous even. They're just a fun mental exercise in making what you have work for you. Instead of wishing and wanting for better, realize you have the capacity to make magic with your existing resources. You may have to go through countless bad ideas before you hit a good one, but it is within your grasp.