So I’ve tried underwater recording before and to be fair, it didn’t really go great. I broke the mic, it didn’t sound right and was disappointing all round. So before Christmas, I had another crack at it to see if anything would work better. For this I needed a new location and since it was mid-floods, Cork and Galway seemed like as good a spot as any.
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The beauty of working with animation is that the dialog is (usually…) nicely recorded in a quiet, sound proofed studio with candles, cushions, personal assistants to mop your brow or whatever else your diva’ish tendencies may require. In general, a lot of VO work is recorded one by one instead of as an ensemble performance which can sometimes lack a sense of unity and fun as there is no one to react to. Of course the good ones will still animate themselves with gestures and alike so the performance doesn’t ’sound’ too sterile but two of this winter’s better films have taken animated voice performances to a new level – and it turns out the secret was to treat it more like a live-action film shoot!
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So this is what music looks like..
Without breaking into a modified chorus of Wet Wet Wet, you might never realise just how much animation is all around you.
And its pretty powerful stuff – I’m an audio guy so I won’t claim to offer any revolutionary insights into the art of animation – but i do know it can educate, make us laugh,cry, cause massive uproar (flick down a few pages to the interesting stuff!), tell a story or just entertain for a few minutes of the day….and it even makes pretty rubbish songs bearable. All these things combine to make some fairly memorable moments in music video history.
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“Ooh, pretty swanky”…..
“That’s a whole heap of shiny buttons”…..
No, they weren’t talking to me…….instead they were commenting on Brown Bag’s new audio suite which has undergone a bit of a revolution. As you’ve probably gathered from our blog, the last 14 months has been pretty full-on getting Olivia, Noddy in Toyland and a smattering of commercials through post production, so this past month has been a welcome bit of downtime. We had taken our previous audio system as far as we could so it was time to move up in the digital world.
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Following on from Richie’s recent blog about there being too much talking in animation, it kinda got me thinking about the way voice overs have changed….how they are used and more importantly, how they are cast.
Traditional voice artists can not only act using just the voice to convey emotions, but they know how to use it to its full potential. Many started out doing a lot of public radio drama/commercial spots whilst also going into TV & film. Although we didn’t know it at the time, guys like Mel Blanc (who is said to have voiced over 400 characters in 5000 cartoons throughout his career, including pretty much every Loony Tunes character) and Daws Butler (Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear) were the voice of many a childhood.
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…DOMINIC LAWRENCE, SOUND ENGINEER
It’s not all about the picture you know…
9:00am (-ish): It’s either the height of nerdyness or a touch of laziness, but my computer is automated to turn on, open up my email, connect to all the necessary servers and start up ProTools on its own, so by the time I’ve turned on TV/monitors and sat down, I’m ready to go. I can’t quite quantify how much time it saves me but its bound to add up, surely…
9.05am: Checking emails – unless it’s audio related mix notes most of it gets filed away or deleted. Then, bar the odd commercials VO recording (and a lunch time blast of anything guitar-based to erase that episodic theme you’ve heard over & over & over), it’s pretty much Noddy all day. What I get up to in a day pretty much depends on what Noddy gets up to on-screen. So for a recent underwater episode, these are some of things I did:
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