I just came back from Victoria, Canada where audio postproduction activities for the UNU-produced documentary Voices of the Chichinautzin are being done. These include narration recording, sound design and mix, and music composition.
This was done at Digiheadz Studio, with sound designer and mixer Tony Moskal (www.digiheadz.com ). Tony has lots of experience recording and mixing audio for documentaries, including productions for Discovery Channel and National Geographic.
We had selected Canadian actress and voice-over talent Nicole Oliver (www.nicoleoliver.com ) to be our voice. Nicole’s wide experience came handy to deliver the required performance under the guidance of Director Patricia Sims. The narration includes quite a few Spanish and Nahuatl terms, so part of my role was to coach Nicole in the proper pronunciation, which she nailed after a couple of tries. The whole recording process took about 5 hours.
For the Spanish version of the documentary we wanted a neutral Spanish voice, with a subtle Mexican accent. Options for this in the Victoria area in Canada were limited, so we found our voice in Mexico City. Recording had to be done in Mexico, so we got PianiMusic Studios (pianimusic.com) in Mexico City for this purpose. As we wanted to direct the recording session, we connected to PianiMusic using Skype from the Digiheadz Studio, so we could hear and give guidance. Nallely’s experience was not as diverse as that of Nicole, yet she also did a great job and delivered the type of performance we were after.
As the last part of the process, we recorded an English version of brief segments of some of the interviews, which were originally delivered in Spanish. This technique is often used in TV, and the way it works is that when you have an interview sequence, you leave the person speaking for a couple of seconds in his native language, and after that you put on top an audio track where the same things are said in English by a narrator. This requires a bit of acting to match the tone and energy of the person in the interview, so we had four native Spanish speaker actors for this purpose.
It all went well, and the recorded tracks are ready to be mixed, but for that we have to wait until music composition is completed, which will happen very soon.