There was only one character left that Hayley and I had not got to voice over, and this was the sheep! Because of circumstance, I could not bring this person into university, so instead I opted to hire out a voice recorder and headphones for two days and record the audio this way. This wasn't as convenient as the sound booth, however it was easy enough to use, I just had to hold the recorder and turn my back away from any incoming noise (for example a window), which was fine for me to do.
I actually got my mum to voice this character because she is Irish and I thought it would be nice to mix up the accents. However it was extremely difficult to direct her and get her to sound extremely conversational, as she kept trying to be over dramatic and emphasise syllables on sentences that didn't need to be emphasised. Though because I am close to her, I was able to tell her she wasn't doing it how I wanted on a good few occasions, so though this perhaps took longer than I anticipated, I think we got there in the end.
The video above is an example of the amount of outtakes we had in only one of the lines, but this is also an example of how my script could have been worded better. The line we were covering was:
"yeah that’s the one, climate change. all of this happens because of that, all of these floods and stuff. pretty bad aint it? can’t image the world in a hundred years, ey, can you?"
But as you can hear in the video, my mum found it complicated to voice naturally, and it was a fault on my end. I didn't think of my mum's accent in mind when I was writing the script, so when she was trying to say 'pretty bad, ain't it', she doesn't really say this ever, so when she was saying it, it sounded forced and fake. I then kept altering it so that she would feel comfortable saying this in one breath, and I think we got there in the end. I added some dialect that she uses ('ah, sure'), to aid her in getting into character and accentuating her accent, which really worked. The final changes I adapted into the line was:
(Highlighted blue to illustrate exact changes)
And these are the final recordings for all the sheep lines that we scripted. I am happy with how these have turned out because I feel like they really have a lot of personality to them and ooze enthusiasm, the only thing I am worried about is how enthusiastic they are in comparison to the other characters. Also for the line where there is a herd of sheep supposed to be saying "RIGHT!" (0:10 second mark), I got my mum and I to say this together, and then in Premiere, I layered these sound files so that it sounds like there are more of us saying it, just like a crowd of people. I also sped up some of the files but only slightly, so that it would also feel like the sheep were saying it at different paces, which I think was successful. Overall though we had a lot of outtakes and at times I couldn't take my mum seriously, I had a lot of fun doing it and I enjoyed seeing the results.
Then because I am quite impatient, I roughly put all of our successful recordings together in chronological order of the script, and added some ambient sound in relation to each scene, just to give myself a picture of what the whole animation could potentially sound like. I am quite excited at what we could achieve, especially since I had a lot of doubts in the beginning, so the get this far and be excited is an accomplishment. Also by putting this audio roughly together before Hayley updates the animatic, allowed me to really envision our animation and give myself an idea of what to expect. I can start to see our characters come to life even more now, which I didn't think was possible. I proud that we have gone from the design stage, to the modelling stage and now giving them voices, all we need to do now if make them move and they really will come to life!
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