A Week in a Voice Actor’s Life: Day 2

Read Day 1

Day 2: Saturday, 13th Nov 2021

Morning 8am+	Woken by heavy construction behind my room
10:30am	Finally rolled out of bed Finished reading The Boar Knight
Afternoon 12:00 - 3:45pm	The recording begins: IVR for a Singaporean catering company (Accent: Neutral; Style: Professional & Friendly) eLearning on Marketing Fundamentals (Accent: Asian; Audience: Adult; Style: Professional, friendly, educational) eLearning for Children (Accent: British; Slower pacing and clear articulation)
Late Aft. 4 - 6pm	Editing on recordings Pickups for eLearning (Marketing)
6:30 - 10:30pm	Dinner at my best friend’s house. We attended an online event to support another close friend in a competition/graduation
10:30 - 10:40pm	Call with Travis Vengroff to lock down on the Narrator’s voice for "The Boar Knight"
​10:40 - 12:15am	Recorded all parts of “The Boar Knight”
1am+	Sleep

Lots of recording today from jobs that came in on Friday. 2 out of 3 are repeat clients.

Expanding on the highlights:

IVR stands for Interactive Voice Responses (Hi, welcome to __, for English, press 1, for Mandarin, press 2 etc), it ‘responds’ to your selection.

This was a fairly simple one, with just the basics (welcome, we’re closed, visit our website).

I like eLearnings. I get to learn as I voice. Today’s first eLearning is on marketing, which is ironic as I was a Marketer for 4 years (LinkedIn, anyone?). The second is for children learning English. Super clear pronunciation and enunciation, in a British accent, a slower pacing but still naturally conversational.

I use Audacity to record and edit my audios

Audio Editing: Not the biggest fan. It takes twice or even three times as much time to edit than to record; even longer if you made lots of mistakes during recordings. But as I was born out of home recording, I’ve been doing my own editing so I’d say I’m not too bad at it.

Pickups: Whilst editing, I’ll pick up on mistakes I made: missing a word or line, mispronunciations etc., so I’d go back and do ‘pickups’. Pickups can be tedious because you need to match your new recording with the original version. Same goes for the editing. The final product has to sound like it was recorded in one sitting with nothing sticking out.

Locking down on the Narrator’s voice was a quick and efficient call where I voice a couple of lines with Travis letting me know if the voice and style is what he envisions. I then go ahead and record the rest of the lines.

Read Day 3 & 4