Recording Rooney

One part of recording that is increasingly in demand and yet often overlooked is that of the voiceover.
Its can mean long dull (yet often lucrative) days of simply pressing record with little or no creative input at all. Conversely if directing as well it can be very enjoyable.

I have a lot of experience in voice direction and recording dialogue for computer games. Each game has a standard of four languages in addition to English, commonly referred to as FIGS - French Italian, German and Spanish. so 4/5s of the dialogue you record and then edit isn't even in English.

Its not not uncommon for games to have upwards of 11,000 lines in each language. You can imagine the monotony of recording editing and managing 55,000 wav files, most of which aren't even in English.

However, sometimes there are terribly exciting days. Much like my Monday. M'colleague, Hugh Edwards, "renowned" voice director, and I packed up the car and headed to Old Trafford to record three Manchester United players for a gambling application.

We took two mobile rigs with us consisting of a mobile booth (or sound boards) Macbook Pros running ProTools, Focusrite 2i2s and a Sennheiser MK4 mics along with various cables and baffles etc.

The players we were to record were Rooney, Fletcher and Rafael. We had a limited amount of time and there was a Motion Capture set-up which had to film some facial movements. Once we were set Hugh decided the easiest way was to cue the players with their lines as opposed to letting them simply read the script.

This entailed Hugh reading each line and the players then repeating (almost) exactly what Hugh had said and how he had said it. We ran two lines for level for each player and ran the whole script twice for each.

Once set we were done within an hour - Audio Ninjas!!!