Category: Narration

Narrator Notes, Bullet Journal style

4/2/2016

A friend very recently introduced me to the Bullet Journal method, originated by Ryder Carroll. It is a flexible way of keeping track of life, prioritising and tracking everything from work projects and yearly goals to fitting in household tasks. A quick Google sees it credited for 'curing' "Idea Overload Syndrome", helping people with ADHD or simply lots to do, and it has spawned a number of videos and Pinterest boards.

At its simplest, it's really a flexible 'to do' list, all in one place. Some people make it into something more creative, colourful and expressive. It's a personal thing, which probably explains its rise in popularity, and so it's possible to adapt it to audio drama management.

Audio books - often 8-10 hours long plus, as Karen Commins mentions on her very informative blog, will take six times that many hours as a conservative estimate to produce. So you will be dealing with projects of around 60 hours.
That may take a lot of accurate planning to fit into your daily schedule.

I have always used very detailed breakdowns of the process in tables, colouring in progress as I go, alongside a calendar schedule, all online.
The bullet journal appealed to me in that it is a visual approach, but also a handwritten one. There is a fascinating article here by Lauren E (Cugliotta) Proctor, citing many pieces of research suggesting that "handwriting may play a role in superior synthesis and retention of complex ideas."

Whatever the reasons, I personally find physically ticking a box or scrawling a quick note can be satisfying.
So, I set about making a Bullet Journal style audio book production overview. In line with the movement, it's freehand rather than drawn up digitally. Many Bullet-journal creators seem to draw new designs for every project, but frankly it's less time-consuming to do it once and scan it.

Here is the page I came up with, which contains basic information and progress boxes, so that it's quick to fill in, and it fits neatly into an A5 size notebook. It may be worth doing a longer, more detailed character breakdown, perhaps with any pronunciation queries for the rights holder (if necessary). But this just allows for a very immediate overview of the state of progress and the number of hours' work remaining.

If you're also wooed by this approach, then have fun designing your own, personalised work schedule!

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What Makes Voice Acting Performance Different?

25/8/2014

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With thanks to Leslie McMurtry

At first glance, voice acting may seem less complicated than 'full body acting' for stage or screen. After all, a voice actor doesn't have to worry about the immediate effect of their physical actions or physical appearance on the audience. However, acting is communication in action, and according to research by Albert Mehrabian, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA, speech only accounts for 45% of communication.
This breaks down as only 7% of communication being words, with tone of voice being 38%.

Voice acting is not simply stage/screen acting with the physical removed. As an experiment, listen to an extract from an unfamiliar movie with your eyes shut. The actors will be using their voices to create character, but in harmony with their physical movements and their surroundings, so it will usually sound like a movie with the picture part missing. Listen to a similar dialogue in a radio play, and the acting should sound 'complete', so that the audience is not distracted by the lack of visuals.

That's not to say that voice actors neglect their physicality. Posture, gestures and facial expressions all affect and change the sound of the voice. A smile will carry over the airwaves, as will tension or energy.

While the limitations of audio can actually be liberating, they can be a challenge. The voice alone has to do the job of all the other senses, so voice actors learn to use it rather like an instrument. The actor is left only with the words, noises (and the rhythm and space within them) with which to express meaning and emotion, but also accent (and related background nationality or ethnicity; age; class; implied physique; speech impediments, etc). Here are some ways in which they may do that:

Vocal Tone
To get different tone, the actor can use different parts of their body to resonate the sound, like head, nose, chest, etc. to make the voice sound reedier, more nasal, broader and stronger (as it goes downwards).

Accent
To find accent, they will usually study the accent from authentic examples (found on Youtube, or on specialist sites such as the fantastic IDEA one. They can practice the shape of the mouth and throat and, eventually, be able to apply those sounds to a script.

Interpretation and Emphasis
Note that Mehrabian's studies showed that tone of voice is responsible for well over a third of communication. Meaning leads to a lot of experimentation and practice. Audio scripts typically have few directions if any, and a sentence like "What are you doing?" has 4 different interpretations to start with, simply by emphasising a different word. Add an emotion, or several and all the takes mount up.

Emotion
Emotion is surprising - as mentioned previously, a smile does travel extraordinarily well over the airwaves, and if the actor is tired, it's quite frightening how the microphone can pick that up. In Old Time Radio, emotions tended to be almost as intense as in stage performances. Nowadays, the general trend is much more for 'Realism', so listeners' ears are tuned in to hear subtle emotional performances.

Of course, actors can do all of the above in a stage play, as well as a whole lot of physical exercises to find posture, movement and so on, but the listeners' focus on the voice alone and the intimacy and sheer sensitivity of a microphone make accuracy and control essential.

Technical Technique
Voice actors also have to take the microphone's sensitivity and quirks into consideration when breathing, making louder noises, positioning themselves (and not accidentally shifting about while speaking). The microphone is an extension of their body and voice, in a way, and so they need to master microphone technique to avoid puffs or clattering about.

Sounding Natural
For satellite audio drama, actors may be cast around the globe. They record several takes of their lines in home studios and then send them back to the mixer/producer. This may happen in screen acting, too, and actors need to work hard on sounding as involved with their imaginary fellow actors as possible.
The mixer can help in treating the lines to make them sound as if they are recorded in the same size/shape space, but it is the actors who can make it truly believable.

My own experience in mixing satellite audio soon taught me that the actors who sounded most natural in their conversation, when mixed in with another characters' lines, were ones who said the words in the same way: they all delivered any dialogue lines as if they were unfinished.
So instead of the listener almost hearing the deadening crash of the question mark in:
"Lovely to see you! So how are you?" the actor would -sometimes almost imperceptibly- continue. It might just be a short intake of breath; or a tiny, abstract vocal sound; or a very slight elongation of the last word in anticipation of the answer. Or occasionally, they would actually begin the first sound of a new sentence.

When they were then placed in a conversation, those extra bits would ride gently under the other person's response and it would compensate considerably for the conversation being recorded separately.

To do this, the voice actor imagines themselves really having that conversation. Perhaps they improvise with it in their head (and often in takes, as well - which is always an extra blessing for the mixer). I personally found that reading and 'hearing' the other characters' voices responding to the lines helped in getting into that mode.

So all in all, voice acting is a slightly specialised form of acting, with the detail that such an intimate medium brings. The aim for all voice actors is to gain control over a wide range of aspects of their voice, in order to express outwardly the character they are feeling from within. Like all creative processes, there are large elements of craft mixed with imagination and experimentation until they find the voice that fits.

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Approaching an Audio Book Narration

11/6/2012

6 Comments

Approaching an Audio Book Narration

This isn't meant to be any kind of definitive guide. These are simply some notes on my own personal discoveries and approaches so far, but if you're about to take on an audio book project and you and your microphone are facing several hundred pages of text, then some of this might be of interest.

The book

Ah, that exciting moment of looking at the book for the first time! If you don't have time to read the entire manuscript before giving an estimate or accepting the job, still have a good look through it and read all of it that you can. This is going to be a big undertaking, so you'll want to be enthusiastic about the story or subject.

Questions you might want to bear in mind while weighing it up are:

How long is the book?
If it is non-fiction, how heavy is it in technical vocabulary?
If it is fiction, how many characters does it have and what voice types and accents do they have? (This is covered later in Narration Style, but if you're planning on performing different voices for each of them, then this will affect how long it takes to record the book, which leads us to...

Estimating the workload

You may be recording the book purely for the fun of it: Librivox is a lovely example of a vast library of free audio books read by volunteers. There, you can opt to read a full book or just a chapter.

Otherwise, some audio books are paid on a royalties (percentage) basis, others on a one-off fee.
Royalties rely on numbers of downloads, which are always uncertain, so you have to go on your instinct for the book.
One-off fees are a little different. You may have to estimate the fee, or decide whether the fee on offer is enough, so in that case a little maths is required:

If you've not done any long narration projects before, it's worth recording a random, full page aloud. Do actually record, because once the microphone is on you may find you make more stumbles than when it's off! Also you will find how well-written and typo-free the book is, as that will also affect how long it takes to complete.

Now take that recording time and you can probably multiply it by two and a half to include time to edit it down if you've stumbled or decided to re-record lines, especially if there is character dialogue. Now multiply that new number by the number of pages and you have a good idea of how long it will take.

For example, if it takes 8 minutes to read one page of a 200 page book, then it might take 20x200 minutes to complete, so, approximately over 65 hours if it goes smoothly. See later section on working with your editor, as they may trim out stumbles if there aren't too many, but you will still want to listen through first to make sure it all recorded and there are no puffs, odd noises, or breaks in the recording etc.

Now you have a number of hours, you can decide how much you can do every day/week and settle a deadline with your editor or publisher. It's a good idea to break up recording time with listening/editing time to give your voice a rest.

As an extra tip: people with dyslexia can find that a tinted page helps to stop the words from appearing to move around. In the same way, while I don't have dyslexia, I have found that I stumble less if I tint the page background a very light blue, grey or green.

Approaching the text

With a large project it can help to break it down, to organise your time and see your progress.

On the first read-through, I make two tables: one for the overview of the book itself and one for the characters.

For the book, I make a calendar-style table, assigning a chunk of chapter or editing slot to each day that I can work on it. As I finish elements I colour the blocks in, as it helps to see the progress! I don't always work in strict order, so use colours to denote 'done' 'overdue' and 'done in advance'.

In the table it can help to put a brief description and number of pages involved, if you're dividing it by chapter rather than equal sets of page numbers.

Narration Style

Listening to audio books, you'll hear that readers vary quite considerably in their narration style. Some narrators keep the same voice throughout, narrating character lines with perhaps more animation, but with no change of pitch or accent. Others change pitch a little depending on gender, or they may give a very light suggestion of accent. At the other end of the scale, they will try to distinguish between the characters with pitch, accent, rhythm, etc.

In my own case I tend to fall into the latter style, as much out of necessity as choice: I have mainly narrated American fiction with quite distinctly-written character voices and references to the characters' home towns or countries. As my narration voice is a general Southern English one - a little different from my natural accent in the same way people often have a 'telephone' voice - it would sound downright peculiar if I didn't change it to read the dialect-heavy dialogue of a New York detective.

So I have to do a lot of research and practice. And that brings us to...

Approaching the characters

This can be the most challenging part - if you do decide to go down the route of differentiating the characters from your own voice. While I try my hardest to get an accent as authentic as I possibly can, I don't pretend to be expert at this. It's a question of trying to listen carefully and practising to improve, but in the meantime I focus on narrating, and then in trying to get a flavour of the characters' voices, and to be consistent in their pronunciation, so as to avoid, as much as possible, native speakers of that dialect cringing!

There are some fantastic resources on the Internet for accents. First of all, I visit the Speech Accent Archive. It boasts a very full library of examples of native speakers from many countries and areas, with details of their age and sex.
They all read the same text, which is designed to contain every sound you might encounter, so it's extremely useful. It also has a transcription for each accent that you can use if you're familiar with phonetics.

A similarly useful resource is the International Dialects of English Archive.

It can also help to visit youtube. Type in '___ accent' and you will often find people have uploaded samples of themselves speaking. There are also videos where their friends with different accents may make fun of them. These can actually be quite useful because they highlight, in an exaggerated way, some of the distinctive sounds and phrases that make that dialect unique.

For foreign languages, you can often find pronunciations just by searching online. Forvo is a site devoted to this and is, again, invaluable.

Then it is a question of trying the accent yourself, copying phrases and sounds as you hear them - and then finally moving on to reading different texts, trying to take the accent with you. In a well-written book, the author has also written the characters voices in that dialect, so you should find it flows once you start reading the dialogue.

I record each line of dialogue more than once, often up to a couple of dozen times. Then later, when editing, I try to listen for the best of the efforts. Alternatively, if there are many people in a scene with different voices I have recorded all of one character's lines separately in one session, while 'immersed' in the accent. It makes more work in editing, but it can help when working on a new accent among many others.

Working with your editor

Your editor - if you are not self-editing - will check for errors, edit and mix, unless you have another arrangement, and they will ask for any retakes. Once you've completed all of that, then your book is finally clear to be released.

Different editors have different levels of involvement in projects: You may be sending files into the ether with little feedback, or you may find yourself working more closely with them and spurring each other on to finish the project.

I found that sharing files via Dropbox or something similar is an easier way to work collaboratively than sending files back and forth. That way, you're both aware of files being updated and can both edit plans or notes without needing to save and upload each time.

Self-editing

If you are self-editing then you may deal directly with the publisher or writer, or with an agent. You will check your own files for errors, pops or puffs and either redo or edit them out with your audio program. There is debate as to whether you should edit out breaths (replacing them with the same length of neutral background noise): in a long book it can be a mammoth task. Otherwise, you'll want to perform noise reduction and possibly de-essing, some light compression and anything else such as equalisation, depending on your microphone and recording environment.

If you are new to audio editing, there are superb resources online that you can find by searching those terms. Communities such as those at Audio Drama Talk forums are always friendly places to read interesting posts and ask for help if you get stuck. As with all jobs working from home, developing positive, supportive relationships online can ward off the loneliness of the long-distance reader and really help to make the marathon of audio book narration a fun and rewarding one.

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Narrator Notes, Bullet Journal style

What Makes Voice Acting Performance Different?

Approaching an Audio Book Narration

Approaching an Audio Book Narration

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Narrator Notes, Bullet Journal style﻿

What Makes Voice Acting Performance Different?

Approaching an Audio Book Narration

Approaching an Audio Book Narration

Author

Archives

Categories

Narrator Notes, Bullet Journal style