It’s 5pm on a Friday, and the day’s really just beginning.
Our lead voice actor, Bridie Connell, has just arrived to the SeeThrough Studios offices. Our audio engineer, Byrce Halliday, is on his way. In less than an hour, we’ll have begun the mammoth task of recording 110 lines of dialogue and 108 attribution lines with 11 different actors in a weekend.
But before we can start, we have to construct the blanket fort.
We chose to do the recording in our office simply due to availability - there was nowhere else where we could guarantee access over a full weekend for no cost. But the office isn’t perfect: the air conditioner is noisy, so we have to turn it off, the meeting room we use heats up astoundingly easily, and the ceiling reflects sound like a mirror… for sound (probably not the best analogy).
One of our voice actors, Nick Starte.
To combat this, we made a blanket fort - the blankets absorb the noise, you see. On the Friday, it was built out of a whiteboard, a chair, a keyboard stand, a rather unstable hat stand and three blankets. On Saturday, we traded out the hat stand for a much more stable clothes rack.
What resulted was a pretty awesome little studio, except for the niggling problem of overheating. Bryce brought an awesome collection of dials and buttons that I got to press and turn on the Sunday, and all the actors brought their A game.
Mixmaster Bryce is working his magic.
I think what astounded me most was how smoothly it all went. We got all 218 lines done in the one weekend, and had time to workshop everything we wanted. We made up 2 names of characters on the spot, and fixed a bunch of lines as we went. Some of the lines were hilarious to hear (hearing Carlo say ‘Hast seen the white whale?’ about 10 times in a row in a variety of ways has got to be my favourite recording of the weekend, followed closely by Bryce’s attempt at a German author of a Physics textbook), and some were unbearably sad. In the end, we’re pretty confident that we got everything right at least once.
So with one major hurdle down, we march closer to the finish line. Now for the rest... - Paul