I booked out the studio for a Voice Over session with Martha for the DPF advertisement. Ariadna and Beata directed the session from inside the booth due to issues with the equipment on the day.
Issues with ‘mouth noise’ on the recording. This is partially due to the Voice Actor moving slightly over the course of the 2 hour recording. Sadly, some of the clearest and best takes are towards the end, where the voice these noises became slightly more noticeable on the recording. There aren’t many fixes for mouth noise. I’ve it up online and mostly the answer is to record better. So lesson’s to be learned about recording Voice Over sessions, setting Microphone placement and checking the position of the microphone regularly with the voice actor over the course of the session.
Mouth noise can be natural and to do with the person. But in this situation, I think we started off with a good microphone placement at around 6″ away from the microphone, slightly elevated from the microphone with a popshield. However when we changed direction and did louder takes the actor instinctively moved away from the microphone instead of testing the new level, I said stay put in the same position but when we started doing quieter takes, again instinctively, she got closer to the microphone and I didn’t notice resulting in clicks and lip smacks from where the microphone is picking up body sounds as well as dialogue. These weren’t audible in the studio, I wonder if I had used headphones to monitor whilst recording, this could’ve been caught there and then, as I hadn’t noticed it from the speakers, which could’ve been down to how long the session had been running and my slight frustrations with the studio not being able to send my voice from the control room that day. There are ways to edit this sound out but they are unreliable and arduous, however if needs be will have to be done. Moving forward when recording VO sessions, there is definitely some lessons learned.
Thankfully due to the De.Coded project with Rethink, the process of editing this 2 hour project is much easier than it would’ve been without that experience of intense editing. Another gripe I had with the session we did was we couldn’t get the microphone to work from the control room, with tech support.
So, I was unable to easily offer advice from the control room and Beata and Ariadna directed from the recording room. If we had let Martha get to the end of the recording more, I would’ve had more to edit from, as a lot of the time she was given different direction messing up one line without getting to the end, which meant these half takes are less useable and I have had to do more editing and mismatching of the dialogue. If the notes from Beata and Ariadna had been from the control room. From looking at the wave form alone, I could work out where the takes are and where people are just talking… which there is a lot of. And also, I would’ve been able to more input on the voice over, considering I am editing radio shows on a weekly basis, it felt a little like there were too many cooks on this session.
I ended up getting 8 takes out of 35, which I’ve sent to Arianda and Beata for their input.