Before I begin writing today, for the uninitiated, I want to also set the background to understand a typical studio scenario for a voice actor. Let us consider a dubbing artist in this case. Enter studio – You just joined the team for this session with a script, an engineer, a dubbing director, a bottle of water, a mic and a recording booth just to yourself. After a gentle exchange of greetings, the engineer comes and helps set up the equipment and checks your relative placement to it, then goes back to the engineer’s bay. There is a clear glass partition that separates that area from your booth. A brief of the story and the character is given, you may watch the beginning of the content to engage your other sensorial faculties and there you go, start rolling.

“Rolling” is a tech lingo that connotes “start recording”. Your director has locked the hours for today’s session and that is already calibrated to the deadline committed by the producer so you are already in the committal of delivery before you know it. In other words, you are trusted. Since the character you are recording for is not someone you could spend any time with, prepare for or even have a dope on to walk its path, here you are – as a Voice Actor, to do the job of the actor in your person and voice but for them. Yeah, exactly. Simply put multi-tasking level 1. The momentum picks up immediately or sometimes in a little while and while observing the character, its mindset, mannerisms, personality, relationships and responses in the series of moments, you are also hearing the source audio called “pilot”, calibrating your speed of speech in another chosen language, embodying the character, working on the breath, listening to the cues and feedback from the director while being in a ready body to respond to the cues of the previous conversations or events on screen.

Well, if one gets specific it is these many things at every moment of dubbing. In a nutshell, it is a hyper-focused job that requires multitasking. Let us call it multitasking level 2. If the day has decided to challenge you a little more then you realize that the script is not metered and needs fewer or more words in every line. So now, you and the team keep creating the text to fit the need while keeping the liveliness of the ongoing scene intact. And just like that, your recording is done for the session and you wrap up and leave for the next recording. Oh, I just forgot to mention, there is contextual analysis and text analysis that happens while you are responding through your takes and you are also mindful of the space in which the character is present whether it is a marketplace, an intimate one or a conversation with someone in a chase or a trek. One last thing at the top of my recall is maintaining your levels of the audio so that there is no loss or distortion of your audio in post, the engineer is very acutely on this task to support you through, which also brings a very high chance of retakes notwithstanding the optimum level and clarity of speech. Well that’s the occupational hazard you could say. Even if you are in not a great mood that day, you need to give that laughter as many times as it takes to get it right. That’s all I guess.

Now, I feel I may have tricked you into feeling that dubbing is a very complicated job and also made you wonder how people do it. So, let me also offer you a simplistic way to look at it. As I said earlier Dubbing is a hyper-focused job that requires 100 per cent presence in every passing moment. Similar to something that driving or sports need. That is what allows one to use all, some or one of their faculties at any moment through real-time response and reaction. Every support in terms of resources or expertise can turn ineffective if the voice actor is not fully present. Though a common internal joke but something to admire is how in the face of a challenge sometimes voice actors dub without the script by simply watching the video and churning and speaking the lines at the same time. Anyways, the next time you watch something do consider watching the dubbed version and spending a few moments pondering behind the mic work of the voice actor whose name you might be able to see in the credit list though after a considerable wait time.

This article was originally posted by the Author on – https://www.thevoiceovernetwork.org/buzz/the-buzz-magazine-interactive/the-buzz-magazine-32nd-edition/