Voiceover

Once we had a rough cut of an episode we would then record the voiceover. Voiceover days were long, tiring but often hilarious. In the original web series we would find a quiet room in the house (usually Sam’s bedroom) and use our normal camera and microphone set-up (Sony HVR-Z5E camera with the Audio Technica AT877 microphone) to do the recording. It worked, but the recordings were not the greatest quality.

When we started to reversion the web series for television it became clear we would need higher quality sound recordings of the voiceover. The first thing we did was upgrade our microphone to a Neumann TLM 193 and preamplifier/ADC to a Sound Devices USBPre2. We knew the voiceover days would be long, so visiting a professional voiceover facility would be too expensive and might not provide the most relaxing atmosphere for the guys to deliver their lines. Instead, Dan built a mobile voiceover booth using wood and old carpet that could fit inside Sam’s bedroom. It would take us 2 hours to erect this booth and Lewis was particularly brilliant at helping out with this. He would also go round the house collecting the guys’ duvets to use as sound deadening on Sam’s bedroom walls. Delivering voiceover is difficult and the guys were all incredibly patient despite being asked to repeat their lines many times for different readings. As you can hear, below, there were a lot of laughs in between takes…