Posts Tagged ‘voiceover’

That “Uh oh!” Moment…

April 24, 2009

It’s happened before. It’ll happen again. The “Uh oh!” moment is NOT a fun thing. But if you’re a professional and you’re good at what you do, in this case, voice acting, you’ll work it out. But let me back up…

On Monday I got a call from one of my agents that I’d booked a gig and I was on hold for 10:00am on Thursday. Awesome. The client had auditioned talent via demos so this was the first I’d heard of the project. It was recording at a studio I’d never been to before, and an impressive space: The lobby was a two-story area with lots of designer elements and what appeared to be custom-made things like lighting fixtures, stair railings, etc. The receptionist asked who I was seeing.

“Um…”

I actually had no idea. I tried to call my agent’s office but just then a woman phoned the receptionist to ask if I was there yet and that I’d be meeting with Nancy. Great. Crisis averted. Apparently this place was so big and busy, even in this economy, that they had a jillion sessions going on this morning and so, you know, not knowing who I was working with could’ve been a bit of an issue. Especially since the receptionist asked “Hmm, are you here for a singing voiceover session? To record a jingle?” Anybody who’s ever heard me sing would know the answer to that would be a resounding, in unison, in stereo where available “NO!”

A few minutes later, Nancy arrived via elevator and took me up a couple of floors. In the elevator, she tells me “So, we listened to a TON of demos…and picked YOU!” As a voice actor, that’s no less rewarding than actually auditioning, specifically, for a project. At least for me. And plus you hear that little voice inside your head go “Yesssss!”

Once at our floor, Nancy led us through a series of winding hallways past any number of recording studios, past a screening lobby, to the studio where we’d be doing our session. The client wasn’t there yet, but she introduced me to a guy named Steve, as well as the engineer, Brian. Both nice guys who almost immediately started to discuss American Idol, in the process lulling me into a sense of comfort as I chatted along with them.

Then the client arrived and it was business time. To be honest, I always get a little bit nervous with a new client. Not so much in a “I hope I don’t screw up” way, but in a way similar to how you might feel going to dinner with a client for the first time. You want it to go well, right? So the client, and his associate, both seemed like good guys, too, which was a nice, quick hop over the first hurdle.

But then came the “Uh oh!” moment…

“So…” the client begins, “we liked your demo a lot.”
“Great, thanks,” I replied.
“Especially,” he continued, “the Olympus spot. The tone of that was great.”

Um. There’s no Olympus spot on my demo. In fact, I don’t think there’s even a camera spot of any variety on my demo with which to confuse for an Olympus spot. Oh, crap. There was the uh oh moment. The thought that I couldn’t get out of my head for the next 2 minutes.

They hired the wrong talent, and the wrong talent was me.

Of course, I feigned a bad memory: “Hmm, I don’t remember that one…” I sorta mumbled as I turned my head and pretended that I wasn’t pretending.

But there was no way I was going to let that little detail ruin a perfectly good session. After all, the client could have mis-remembered the spot. If they did truly listen to a lot of demos, that could be a thing that could happen, realistically, right?! And besides. I’m a professional. I mean, this is what I do. All I have to do is take direction well and deliver the goods and, provided they weren’t looking for a DLF performance, I should be good to go.

And in fact, the words “natural” and “conversational” came up. No sweat. I can do natural and conversational no problem.

I should point out that there were five scripts, and as we were recording voice for the launch of a big, new product, the client wanted to make sure we had time to get it just right, and as such had booked the studio for a double session.

Now, direction comes to you in a few different ways. Sometimes, it all comes from the client. A couple weeks ago, in my session for Corona, there were five people from the ad agency as well as one person from the beer company, the engineer, an assistant, a guy who just seemed to be wandering around, somebody ready to get bagels and coffee and, for some inexplicable reason, a mime wearing a banana suit. Don’t ask. But all of the direction came from one of the ad agency people:  The woman who, I believe, had written the spot.

Sometimes, though, the direction comes from the engineer after he or she speaks with the client following a take. Sometimes it’s all from the engineer. In this case, it was a combination. Mostly, the client would give comments to the engineer who would in turn give me some new direction. Sometimes the client would give me direction himself, and then I would intepret that based on what I’d just done and follow up with “So, kind of like this…” and then give an example.

The first script was the shortest, and I think we did 7 or 8 takes of that one. After that, the voice and tone were set and on two of the other scripts, they were happy with the first take. Awesome. Of course we did a couple more of each as safeties, but I was glad that they were digging what I was doing and, to be honest, after just the first couple of takes of the first script, the “Uh oh!” moment had left my head and it was just business as usual.

In all, we were done after about 35 minutes. The client seemed to be very happy. He thanked me and said he hoped we’d work together again…a sentiment I shared. (I’ve worked with clients before who seemed like they either had no idea what they wanted or no idea what they were doing, so working with a client like the one in this story, who definitely knew both of those things, is always a very good thing). Nancy walked me back through the maze of halls to the elevator, telling me “Wow, that went a lot smoother and faster than we were even hoping it would…great job!”

Sweet. I was pleased with myself, professionally. As I walked out of the elevator and said goodbye to Nancy, it struck me again how great it is to be able to do something that I love to do, and get paid to do it.

But most of all, I was glad that I didn’t let the “Uh oh!” moment get the best of me.

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E-MU No More

April 8, 2008

Well, if you happened to read my blog entry about building a DAW, you know that I have an E-MU sound card, the 1616m, in my audio machine.

Unfortunately, a driver updated in windows update (I think for my Bluetooth kb/mouse) kind of killed my E-MU drivers yesterday. So I went to the E-MU website for tech support only to find no phone number. I eventually got in touch with somebody else at Creative who told me that E-MU has, effectively, been shut down.

This is a real drag since the E-MU products are really nice. Until this other driver nixed my E-MU yesterday, I’d had no trouble with it at all…easy to install, easy to set up and configure, and it works. And sounds good, too.

If you go to their website, you can still download the latest drivers for things, and I was told that they’ll keep working on drivers for a while still, but the division is in fact going away, and no new products will be forthcoming.

You can find them at http://www.emu.com

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The Evolution of Storage

March 18, 2008

Voiceover people love storage. And lots of it. While audio still takes up nowhere near as much disk space as video, it’s still relatively a storage hog in the world of traditional computer data. So at a time when hard drive storage and lots of it is so cheap, and it’s not uncommon to see PCs ship with 1TB (terabyte, or 1,000 GB) of disk space, I figured now would be a good time to take a quick look at the evolution of storage and where it’s going.

The hard drive was invented over 50 years ago, at IBM, in 1956, but they didn’t gain momentum in use with microcomputers until sometime in the ’80s, when the IBM PC/XT began shipping with internal hard drives. You could buy external drives for Apple II computers…they only stored 5MB (yes, megabytes) of data and cost around $2000. Today, you can walk into a Best Buy and get 160GB of storage for under $100. That’s 32,000 times the storage for 1/20 the price.

Most drives today in desktop computers spin at 7,200RPM with capacities up to 1TB. Notebook and laptop drives, which are physically smaller (2.5″ compared with 3.5″ for desktop drives) usually spin at 5,400RPM with capacities up to 250GB. Meanwhile, in servers that use higher-performance SCSI drives, the disks spin at 10,000 or 15,000RPM and generally have capacities up to around 300GB.

But in the last couple of years a new type of storage option has been gaining popularity. This is the SSD or Solid State Drive. These are already available and are devices that act like an ordinary hard drive, only they have no moving parts (hence the name) and can be very fast.

In theory, an SSD isn’t much different than your typical USB memory stick, except that it can have a higher capacity and can be much faster. The highest capacity USB memory sticks go up to about 32GB, which is nothing to sneeze at, but they’re much slower than a hard drive. Meanwhile, some companies have 128GB and even 256GB SSDs – enough to use in a laptop or even a desktop computer – with speeds that can be almost twice as fast as a conventional laptop or desktop hard drive.

But not all SSDs are created equal. I’m sure you’ve seen the barrage of MacBook Air TV commercials. The MacBook Air can be purchased either with a conventional hard drive or with an SSD. But many users are complaining that the SSD version offers no speed improvement or power savings (something an SSD should be able to do since it’s got no moving parts).

What it does have is a much higher price. $1,300 higher than a comparable MacBook Air with a normal hard drive.

And this is the big thing with SSDs. They’re very expensive. Again, while some SSDs use slower memory or architecture, others focus on performance. A company called Memoright has a 128GB SSD that has been tested at being twice the speed of a normal hard drive (see here for a review). But the price is incredibly high: $3,400 for the 128GB SSD.

It’s like the ’80s all over again.

Another company, STEC Inc., has even announced a 512GB SSD with real-world speeds that exceed those of the fastest SCSI drives and use only half the power. Now, if you’re wondering why these companies all sound unfamiliar, don’t worry. There are SSDs by major manufacturers such as Samsung, SanDisk and Lexar, and even Intel, but the bigger companies tend to take a little bit more time to get to market.

As with all new, expensive technology that has mass-market appeal, as time goes on, the prices will continue to drop more and more. Estimates are that within 4 years or so, SSD pricing will be at about $2 / GB, so figure $1,000 for a 512GB drive by that time.

Obviously, SSDs have a tremendous amount of potential in all areas of computer storage, not just DAWs and video production. And it does seem like SSDs are probably going to take over for traditional hard drives at some point: In addition to being able to match hard drives in terms of speed, the capacities will keep growing, and again, prices will keep dropping. And less power usage is always a good thing. But one of the biggest advantages is that SSDs have no moving parts, so their potential for longevity and reliability is much greater than that of the typical hard drive.

I’m really looking forward to using this technology myself. You know, as soon as the pricing gets out of the early ’80s.

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My Blog Featured at Voices.com

March 17, 2008

Voices.com’s Vox Daily has included my blog in their article “100+ Industry Resources for Voice Over Talent”, along with a bunch of other cool and useful sites and resources. Check out the article at this link:

Vox Daily: 100+ Industry Resources for Voice Over Talent

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Useless Voiceover Trivia #1

March 10, 2008

Why not, right? And, it’s not really useless, because you never know when you might be walking down the street and a stranger comes up to you and asks you a seemingly random question to which you just happen to know the answer, prompting the stranger to hand you a check for a million dollars.

Hey, we all have our daydreams.

Anyway…

So, did you ever wonder where 48-V Phantom Power came from? Me either, until tonight when I was trying to think of some useless voiceover trivia to post. Although other forms of Phantom Power had been used before, the first use of the 48-V Phantom Power found in so many pro mics today was on a Neumann microphone called the KM 84, manufactured for Norwegian Radio in 1966.

Interested in owning a KM 84? You can find them (along with just about everything else) on eBay. I’ve refrained from including a direct link to a current auction since it’ll be useless in a month or so, but the cheapest one on there right now is about $1k.

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Close Encounters of the Audio Kind

March 8, 2008

Voiceover artists, radio people and gearheads in general can get really passionate about their likes and dislikes when it comes to audio tech. Especially microphones. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert in this arena…I’ve recorded on lots of different mics and thought I sounded better on some than others, but a lot of it has to do with what I was reading and how I was reading it.

Yesterday, I posted about a job where I had to voice match myself, replacing audio I recorded two years ago. One of the interesting things about this job was the microphone I used.

The studio where I recorded has no traditional sound booth. In fact, my recording was done sitting at a desk with a bunch of computer and audio equipment on it. About 4 feet behind me was a big window, looking out to a Chicago street, just a few blocks away from one of the biggest train stations in the city.

At one point, I was recording and I stopped as a train was passing nearby. The clack-clack-clack of the train wheels over track seams and the engine roar were pretty loud, so I stopped reading.

A few seconds later, the producer, who was listening from another room where he was actually laying the audio down to a computer, asked “Is something wrong?”

“I just figured I’d wait for the train to pass,” I said.

“Oh, I didn’t hear it. I’m still rolling…just go on when you’re ready.”

So how is this possible? How could I record “clean” audio in a non-sound treated room with a diesel locomotive passing by just a few blocks away?

The answer is in the microphone we were using. A handheld job from a company called Coles – the 4104 Commentator’s Noise Cancelling Ribbon Microphone.

Designed in the 1950s by Dudley Harwood and D.E.L. Shorter of the BBC, the 4104 is a pressure gradient ribbon microphone with a lot of acousting damping. What this means is that it’s very good at picking up the speaker but little else.

While the technical aspects of how this is achieved are beyond my knowledge (and, perhaps, understanding), it becomes a little easier to understand once you see the microphone and how it’s used.

Coles 4104 Microphone

The XLR connection for the mic is at the base of the handle, so the mic needs to be hand-held. Notice, though, that the business end of the mic is covered by two screen filters: There’s an oval filter across the front of the mic and a second filter, this one rectangular, that covers the top of the mic and protrudes from the front of the mic by about 1/2″ with a rounded, concave leading edge.

The purpose of this leading edge is that the speaker is supposed to rest this up against his or her upper lip. Yes, the mic is actually designed to touch your face while you’re speaking, which seems odd compared to the use of most mics, but doesn’t really create as much of an issue as it might seem like it would just by reading about it. This funky usage style has led to the 4104 being called “The Lip Mic” by some.

And I have to say, the mic works really well. It seems to have a pretty flat sound, which to me means that it doesn’t add much in the way of presence or brightness…it just reproduces what the speaker sounds like. And it picks up very little, if anything else. The Coles product literature for the 4104 claims that it can be used outdoors in winds up to 20mph with no noticeable decrease in the vocal quality of the user. That is pretty darn cool.

Do a little research on the mic and you’ll see it’s been used to record at sporting events, in big crowds, during hurricanes, in taxi cabs and in plenty of other environments where an ordinary mic would require the voice talent to shout just to be heard.

The 4104 sells for about $650 – $700 and would seem to be a good mic to investigate if you frequently find the need to record in loud places or spaces that haven’t been acoustically treated.

The official product page for the 4104 can be found here.

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Voice Matching…Yourself

March 7, 2008

Sometimes it’s referred to as “doing an impersonation”, but others refer to it as “voice matching”. It’s the practice of voiceover work where you need to have your voice match the voice of somebody else so that the two can be used interchangeably. Often this occurs when the original performer isn’t available, or is too expensive, to do pickup work for things like advertisements, trailers, video games or even for a movie itself.

There are definitely voice actors and comedians out there who can do a number of really impressive impersonations. Make no mistake that this is a talent that not as many people have as you might think. Voice matching can be pretty difficult. Like most things, if you have a knack for it, you can probably improve with practice, but it does take skill.

Surprisingly, it also takes some skill to voice match yourself. Today I was hired to record some voiceover for an industrial film for a company for whom I’d done work about two years ago. The catch was that I was updating my previous work for them with new facts and figures. The original script was about an hour’s worth of material. Now, there were4 7 paragraphs of material where information had changed, such as how much the company does in sales each year, the number of employees, etc.

I was recording at the same studio, which made it a bit easier, but it’s still a bit of a challenge. You have to match not only your pacing (which , of course, can be tweaked somewhat in post), but also the tone, pitch, inflection, etc.

Fortunately, the session went really well…after recording a few test paragraphs, the producer swapped alternating sentences of the old audio with the new, and even without doing any editing, a 3rd party wasn’t able to tell the difference between them. As a result, we were able to just re-record those 7 paragraphs instead of the entire script.

I really enjoyed this project, even though it ended up being pretty short. It’s fun to be able to either perform or create a new character, but I learned after this project it can be equally fun trying to voice match my own previous work!

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You Take the Good, You Take the Bad

February 16, 2008

I woke up yesterday morning and my throat was killing me. Terrible timing, considering I had two voicover things I had to do. First was a session I’d been hired for to be the voice of a Chicago engineer for a Lionel toy train. A pretty cool gig, and there was a fair amount of copy…not just me saying something like “All aboard!”. No, this was a well-thought-out script with a lot of authenticity to it, and I’d been hired based on an audition I provided in my best Chicago accent…or at least the best one I thought fit the character.

So at about noon, the session began, and despite the need to have every line read twice (just for safety’s sake), we were wrapped up in just about 30 minutes. Not bad for over a hundred lines. In fact, it was quite nice to be complimented on the session by the director, who said it was one of the “best and most painless ones of these I’ve worked on.” Always nice to get that kind of compliment, especially when you’re feeling lousy, physically.

But then came voiceover event #2, an audition for Nationwide Insurance. Now, I could just be imagining the worst, but after a few takes of the audition, which I read with two other people, a woman and a little girl who was, by the way, brilliant, the director (a great guy with whom I’ve worked before) said that I was done, but asked the other two people to stay because he’d “lost a couple of people and needed them to read again.”

Uh oh.

Again, maybe it’s just me being paranoid, but it sure felt an awful lot like a “That sucked, so you ladies please stay here while I bring in somebody who isn’t gonna sound terrible reading with you!”

I’m sure there are people who never have to deal with this…people who, even with pneumonia or strep, could whip out a perfect session or perfect audition. Some of these people may have more experience than me, and some may just be better than me (although none, I would argue, are any more dedicated than I am to delivering a great performance). This, though, is one of the interesting things about voice acting, and I’m sure, about acting in general. You’re gonna have your great moments, when you really shine, and really feel great about it. And then you’ll have your not-so-great moments, when the people you’re reading for, or performing for, are thinking maybe your game’s a little bit off.

It’s just a little odd when they happen one right after the other.

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The Voices of the Inhuman

February 12, 2008

A lot of people seemed to be pretty darn excited when they learned that Peter Cullen had been cast to reprise his role as the voice of Optimus Prime for last year’s blockbuster action movie. And as a voice actor, it’s neat to konw that people get so attached to these disembodied voices…well, disembodied, that is, from their human counterparts. On film or TV, these voices are anything but disembodied, as they breathe life into the characters and make them likable or unlikable, but memorable either way.

So lately a lot of press has been given to the voice of K.I.T.T. in the remake of “Knight Rider” set to begin airing in less than a week on NBC. Originally cast was Will Arnett, who’s been the voice of GMC Trucks for years. Oops. K.I.T.T., you see, is no longer a Trans Am, but a Ford Mustang. Sure, some of us consider this cross-step almost as crazy as the idea of making Dr. Emmett Brown’s next time traveling supercar out of a Mini Cooper, but then again, just as there are no more DeLoreans, there are no more Firebirds or Trans Ams in Pontiac’s lineup. So GMC 4-wheeled it over Arnett’s K.I.T.T. and the producers tapped Val Kilmer to be the new voice of the new brainchild of Knight Industries.

Ok, so we’ve got Cullen as Optimus Prime and Val Kilmer as the new K.I.T.T., but there have been so many actors who’ve voiced so many inhuman, or should we maybe say “non-human” characters in movies and TV over the years. Who are some of the more notable ones?

Well, of course, there’s the original K.I.T.T., voiced by William Daniels. And a fine job he did, too, reminding The Hoff’s Michael Knight, on many occasions, how very foolhearty he was being. And everybody knows that Anthony Daniels (no relation) played C-3PO in the Star Wars films. There’s Dick Tufeld, who provided the voice of the Robot in “Lost in Space”. But how many of the following can you correctly name without reading ahead? For me, most of these names were unfamiliar until I looked them up.

Number 5 – The spunky, clunky, cute little robot from “Short Circuit” was voiced by Tim Blaney, who reprised the role in the sequel from a couple years later, “Short Circuit 2″. A quick check on IMDb shows that a new sequel or remake is scheduled for this year!

W.O.P.R. – The behemoth military computer from “Wargames” was voiced by John Wood, who also played Dr. Stephen Falken in the film. According to commentary on the DVD, the voice was rendered as we heard it by having Wood read words flatly one at a time, and not in any order relating to the script, and then assembling them into W.O.P.R.’s lines and running them through a synthesizer. Pretty neat!

M.C.P. – Another example of a Brit voicing a computer, David Warner, who played Ed Dillinger / Sark, also voiced the big, bad computer at the heart of all the hijinks of Disney’s 1982 groundbreaking feature “TRON”. Ok, some of you right now are thinking “Groundbreaking?! TRON?!” But, heck yeah! Think about it! It was the first full-length feature film that was set mostly in 3D scenes. In 1982! That’s pretty cool. What else is pretty cool is that IMDb also shows a TRON listed for 2010. Wow. Hopefully the new one won’t include dialogue as ridiculous as in the original: Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn, the mastermind behind Space Paranoids, Matrix Blaster and a whole slew of games that Dillinger ripped off before canning Flynn, seemingly doesn’t even understand the computers that he uses to create the best video games in the world. This is evidenced by his emotionally-charged “Because, man! Somewhere, in one of these…”memories”…is the evidence!” Yeah. Ok. Next.

H.A.L. 9000 – Acronym’d computer #3 here, the antagonist of 1968′s “2001: A Space Odyssey”, was voiced by Douglas Rain, who reprised the role in 1984′s “2010″. Maybe even more fun is that in Woody Allen’s 1973 film “Sleeper”, Rain is credited as voicing the “Evil computer/various robot butlers”. Hey, if I had a shot at adding that credit to my v.o. resume, I’d be all over that like sand on a beach.

Dalek – Peter Hawkins, who voiced the Daleks in the original Doctor Who series, passed away in 2006. The voice of the Daleks was also played by John Scott Martin. But BBC Wales’ new version of the show had already started without either of them, this time enlisting the vocal talents of Nicholas Briggs. A cool character to be sure, but if I hear that voice say “Exterminate!” ONE more time…

Enterprise – In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the ship’s computer was voiced by Majel Barrett, who was Gene Roddenberry’s wife. Barrett also played Lwaxana Troi, mother of ship’s counselor Deanna Troi and in fact is the only actor to be in all five Star Trek TV shows, having played the ship’s / computer’s voice in all five series as well as a handful of other characters.

Edgar – Ok, so it didn’t try to launch a global thermonuclear war, and it never tried to Exterminate! But Edgar, the lovesick computer in 1984′s “Electric Dreams” is one of my favorite talking machines. Ever. I’m not sure if it’s that he came to life when he had champagne spilled on his keyboard, or if it was that despite being a computer, his grammar was so dreadful (“What is an brain?”), or if it’s that I can relate to his unrelenting pursuit of Virginia Madsen. Um, wait a second…no, that was NOT me following her! Forget I said that! Anyway, whatever the reason, Edgar, voiced by Bud Cort, was cool, childlike, creepy and likable all at the same time. And I don’t get why “Electric Dreams” STILL hasn’t been released on DVD!

For me, each of the above performances is pretty memorable. Just goes to show you know a great performance can make a great character, and make that character live on for years and years.

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