Spanish Simpson’s actors threaten boycott of Simpsons Movie, Stand Up in Kandahar on the CBC, Meteorite?, Elie Hirschman on voice acting rehearsals via Skype, Colin Campbell discusses compression and Call out to Aussies in the VOX Box.
Download Podcast Episode 20 »
Tags
The Simpson’s, Spanish Voice Actors, Gabriel Chavez, Mr. Burns, Kandahar, Shaun Majumder, Mark Critch, Meteorite, Elie Hirschman, Darker Projects, Skype, Colin Campbell, Australian English Dialect, Australia, Australian Accent, Aussies.
Transcription of Vox Talk #20
Male: Episode 20
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Hi! I’m Stephanie Ciccarlli, and you’re listening VOX Talk, the industry leading voice over podcast. Elie Hirschman and Colin Campbell are joining us today. Before those two gentlemen take the stage, let’s jump into the news.
Male: The Loop, informing you of news and current voiceover events.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Will the wrath of the Spanish speaking Simpson’s voice actors thwart a Spanish dubbing of the Simpson’s Movie? Sources say that the voice actors who give voice to the Simpson’s cartoon in Spanish are threatening to boycott the Simpson’s Movie. If you remember, these were the same talent who were dissatisfied with the status of their pay going back to issues that rocked the Simpson’s boat in 2005. Will the statements of Gabriel Chavez, who provides the Spanish voice of Mr. Burns, stop the movie from being recorded in Spanish? Visit cinematical.com for more information.
Are you in need of a laugh? A little while ago a number of Canadian comedians headed to Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan to encourage the troops and deliver some much-appreciated fits of giggles. Since then, the footage has been edited and will air on the CBC on Wednesday March 14th at 8 p.m., hosted by Shaun Majumder of This Hour Has 22 Minutes fame. To learn more and watch clips from the program, visit cbc.ca/standupinkandahar
To wrap up, there were funny things going on in the heavens on Sunday night, witnessed by people in Southwestern Ontario and as far as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A bolide, or meteorite was confirmed sighted between 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. EST, blazing across the sky, burning up before our eyes, complete with a tail. I happened to see this first hand at 8 p.m. while driving west toward London from Hamilton just outside of Brantford’s city limits.
Wonder what other people were thinking? Check out the article in the Toronto Star at thestar.com
Male: The Biz, helping you grow your voiceover business.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Today in The Biz, Elie Hirschman discusses how his voice acting group uses Skype to rehearse for their productions.
Elie Hirschman: Hi, this is Elie Hirschman. I work with the group called Darker Projects. You maybe familiar with our work, we produce some of the finest audio fiction to found on the internet and we are an internet base group which means we don’t have any one central location where we produce our audio. We have writers, actors, producers, post-producers, directors and composers from every corner of the globe. Our head of Post-Production lives in Arizona, our Head of Production lives in Upstate New York, our Executive Producer lives out in Portland Oregon, some of our composers are in Australia, New Zealand and our actors are from all countries.
So, we have a very unique challenge in front of us. How do we get our actors to collaborate and produce something consistent and coherent? How do we get everybody on the same page? We’ve explore the avenue of using Skype as kind of a around table discussion forum. We’ve all chatted, we’ve all e-mailed but you hear somebody’s voice and you can response immediately and you can hear the inflection in someone voice. It’s so much different experience then just exchanging a couple of e-mails or IM’s, so we have use Skype mostly among the producers and directors of us to kind of hash things out, talk about our plans, get some feedback and it is very helpful because instant gratification.
We’ve also entertain the idea of having our talent all sign on to Skype at the same time or Ventrilo or Team Speak or one of those other voice chat programs and just – with the script in hand, have everybody read their parts, not for any kind of production propose but as a rehearsal, as a live – again the feedback that one actor would get from the other to see how the line would play off of each other. I think it could be an invaluable resource. I think all audio production companies could benefit from this approach. I think our productions speak for themselves and our testaments to this kind of collaboration. So, come check our stuff out at darkerprojects.com.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: I really appreciate your story, Elie. Thank you for sending it in.
Male: Tech Talk, walking you through the technological landscape.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: And now here’s a great segment from Colin Campbell of AffordableAnnouncer.com.
Colin Campbell: I have my first request, what is this compression you’re talking about?
Well, in order to understand audio compression and dynamics processing, you almost have to understand a lot of technicalities of audio in the first place. You almost have to know the terms like decibel and threshold and gate. There’s a lot there but let me try to narrow it down for the lay person. Basically what compression or dynamics processing does is make you sound louder within a given space, you make this MP3’s and you try to keep your level to a certain point because you can only go so far and after that it’s sound bad, it’s distort, eclipse. So, you only have so much room to work with, so what compression does is it tries to push more of that volume that’s in that file up against the higher end to make the total effect sound louder.
Now, in order to do that you have a couple of things and the first thing is you have a threshold. A threshold is a point in the volume level, above which you’re going to compress the audio to make it fatter and then a lot of time in the case of my mic processor below that threshold you do what it’s called, downward expansion. Expansion is the opposite of compression. Expansion makes quiet sounds quieter, compression makes loud sound louder that’s a little nit simplified and I know that they’re going to some techies out there saying, “Yes, you’re not explaining it right” but those are people that understand all of the technicalities behind it.
I’m just trying to give lay person a general understanding of what it is. What is it is to make your voice fatter and apparently louder and I say apparently because it’s a perception because you’re taking mid range volume levels and racing them up against the top end to make your voice fatter and in make care simultaneously downward expanding quiet sound to be quieter to reduce breathes, background noise whatever is undesirable in the signal. Compression basically enhances the loud what I called (bossy) sounds up against the top and then downward expands the undesirable quiet sounds and makes them low and lower and less apparent.
On my processor, I have three knobs that are involve with process of compression and downward expansion. I have the downward expansion, how much of it? I have the threshold and that is the dividing line between expansion and compression, above the threshold you have the compression ratio. The compression ratio is how much you’re going to squeeze the available sound above that volume threshold to make it compress and be fat and be loud. And again it’s a perception, a perceived loudness. It’s not really louder there just more of the signal pushed up against the top to make it feel and sound louder.
Well, that the best I can do. If anybody has any specific questions, I don’t know your various technical levels. You can ask me, I’m there are so much to talk about when it comes to dynamics processing. Just remember this dynamics processing is affecting the sound of your voice in such a way or whatever recording you have, in such as way that it sounds apparently louder than it really it and it also can attempt if your setup is correct to cut down on any undesirable lower noise levels or breathes or undesirable signal that might creep in there. I know there are a lot of people on here are not going to like this description and I did the best I could. It’s very technical and I’m just trying to help. So, thanks. Bye.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Thank you Colin! That was a really great segment. If you have any comments or questions for Colin maybe something youd like to see him cover on the show you can always e-mail him from his Voices.com page at colincamp.voices.com or at AffordableAnnouncer.com.
Male: VOX Box, answering your voiceover questions.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Last week, I mentioned on the VOX Daily blog that I’d be writing an article about the Australian English dialect. If you are an Australian voice talent and would like to contribute to the article on your accent, send me an email at [email protected] ! We’d love to hear from all the Aussies out there to make this the best article on why people should hire Australian talent available on the Internet.
That’s all for today’s show. If you have something you’d like to say in the VOX Box segment or a segment for The Biz or Tech Talk, send your MP3 file to be featured on the podcast to [email protected]. I’m your host Stephanie Ciccarelli. We’ll see you on Thursday!
Links from today’s show:
Spanish Simpson’s Voice Actors Threaten Boycott
Stand Up In Kandahar CBC
Toronto Meteorite
Darker Projects
Elie Hirschman
Colin Campbell
Leave a comment