Fresh

Last week I was lucky enough to play a small, but fun, part in cool project. To enhance a video that was created for a promotional piece for a client, I was recruited to produce some audio effects and voice-over editing. This is extremely exciting as most of my job entails fishing for leads and writing content for bait.

So, the video in question consists of several frames of copy, explaining the process of creating a community website. It was decided that the video could have a greater impact if a voice was saying the words as they appeared, but finding the right voice was a challenge. We wanted to convey an air of sophistication, mystique, and intrigue, which would compel the reader/listener to wonder what exactly this site was all about. We also wanted them to feel special that they were among the elite artists selected to be a part of it.

Charles and I met with Mary McDonald, a renowned voice actor, at her home studio to be the voice of the project. Mary is best known as the voice of On*Star, and also as Lady Jaye from the GI Joe cartoon. After giving her some direction, Mary laid down 8 takes in about 30 minutes. She gave us a couple conversational takes, a couple British-flavored takes, and a couple mysterious espionage-flavored takes.

Our session with Ms. McDonald was really fun, and efficiently productive. After we finished, we had all her takes in a .wav file that looked like this:

I then took the raw vocals, and mixed and matched our favorite parts and phrases from all her different takes, rendered the in-between breaths to silence, and got rid of all the dead space, ending up with a single proper take, like this:

Then I added some “stereo whispers” echo fx on the vocals, adding to the air of mystique.

On multitrack, I added in a gradually oscillating, resonant sound, that I produced in another program, against the vocal (I wanted to get crazier with it but someone wouldn’t let me, right Chuck)?:

After mixing that down, I shipped it off to Noel, our Flash producer, who mixed it in with the Flash video. Then voila! Here is the final audio track: Final Audio Track