Desmond, bitch.

We finally recorded the voiceovers for Precedent last night. We scored a really nice recording studio for a relatively cheap price. The sound quality is very professional, so I'm very happy! There was also an expert sound mixer/engineer on board, mixing our recording on the spot. We were really lucky to have him there.

When we recorded for OTSS, we didn't get to have that luxury. Ricky (gToon) was the sound expert, but he was also acting in most of the scenes as well. While most of the sound was great, one of our actors (you can probably guess which one) was too loud and caused all sorts of troubles. In the end we had to cut out most of his takes, and somehow Ricky stitched up a workable edit.

The way that I record voice acting is to have the actors in the same room at the same time. Most voice acting is done line by line if I'm not mistaken, with an actor locked in a room repeating the same line in different ways. I prefer a more dynamic approach, setting up multiple mics (or taking turns) in one room, and having the scene play out as if it were being filmed with the actors playing off each other.

One problem we ran into was the turning of scipt pages - that one month since the rehearsal turned out to be detrimental, as our actors had forgotten a lot of the lines, especially the longer ones. They had to resort to reading off the page, which not only caused problems with the acting itself, but we also had to be careful about the noise of turning our pages. The more things the actor has to think about, the worse the performance is... we had to resort to pausing after each page to turn it over. That also totally killed the pacing of the scene. The first half of the scene was great, in the second half, one actor had trouble getting through the long lines, and since we were on a time limit, we had to come up with something.

I usually do voice recording in three steps: 1) a recorded rehearsal, 2) a few run throughs of the script as it is, and 3) a completely improvised version on top of the script. We only had time to do the first two steps. The third step is my favorite, and because we were running out of time, I wanted to take the chance. Halfway into step two, we went into improv mode for the remainder of the time, and the result was great. I actually regret not having started it sooner. The freedom of not having to read words the correct way off the paper felt like a huge breath of relief. Between all of the takes from the rehearsal, the run throughs, and the short improv, we definitely got a nice little performance. :)