Audio Book Recording


Audios, Amigos
http://www.backstage.com/backstage/features/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000913612
Actors discuss the challenges of narrating books on tape.
By Terry Morgan

Audio books could be considered the equivalent of a one-person show, except in this case the show could last 30 hours or more if the book is unabridged. Unlike other areas of voiceover, the recording of an audio book can take a month, or even months of full workdays. An audio book requires an actor with great speaking skills who can perform multiple characters, often in rapid succession or even in conversation with one another.

Ellen Reilly, the reader of the Random House Audio production of the popular children's book and New York Times bestseller Chasing Vermeer, had plenty of experience leading up to her audio book work, from radio and voiceover to theatre and improv. Her introduction to the audio book industry was a little unusual, but it got her foot in the door."It was through a theatre contact," she says. "Somebody knew somebody who's always looking for new voices for things. I was recommended by a friend of a friend and went in and auditioned, and, lo and behold, I got it. That was a couple of years ago, and it was a very illustrious title: Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, the novelization of the film. I was Velma, the bookish one."

Reilly points out that the successful recording of an audio book requires more than a mellifluous voice. "It's sort of a different skill set," she says. "People who have fantastic voices that you just want to listen to for hours and hours on end may not necessarily be the best choice. There are other things that may make a producer want to work with you again: You read well and don't stumble too much--just the practical things. Do you pop your p's too much? Do you mix up the words constantly? Those are boring details, but I think they may figure in to why a producer might call you." Reilly says she reads the book before she records and may research accents. "Sometimes I'll write down the character's names and put down a little description so that it'll trigger for me what I did for their voice," she says. "I'll have two characters [separate in my mind], and then they'll meet, and they're speaking to each other, and I [realize] they sound too much alike. If you're not a man of 1,000 voices, you have to rely more on what the character is about: their speech patterns--do they speak rapidly, do they speak with authority--are they meek, is the voice way deep down inside of you, whatever. You have to rely on that; there's only so much that the human voice can do. It's a lot of that acting stuff. You think in terms of their intentions and their self-confidence, all that sort of stuff. All those levels can come out in the voice."

Tony-winning actor Roy Dotrice performed the narration for the Random House Audio production of George R. R. Martin's fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire, and his path to the audio book world was equally unorthodox."A friend of mine introduced me to it, a man called Ted Kryczko," he says. "He was in charge of all the Disney recordings. You know how they do all these read-along books for kids? I did these, a number of them, things like The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast. Along the way I picked up a platinum record and a couple of gold records for doing these things. So I suppose I got a bit of a reputation for doing this voiceover stuff. George R.R. Martin, who wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, he was one of the producers of [the TV program] Beauty and the Beast, which I was in for three and a half years or something. George knew me, and so when he'd written this novel and wanted to record it, he knew I'd done a lot of voiceover work, so he asked me to record them. I did, and it was a mammoth task." We did the first three volumes, and each one was well over 1,000 pages," Dotrice continues. "During those three volumes I had to find voices for over 800 different characters. I found it very difficult, because [the book's setting] was sort of medieval, and therefore you couldn't use American accents, for a start, because America hadn't been discovered at that point. One had to do all one's German and Italian and French and Russian, you know. With all of these characters I had to do, I could only get through about 30 pages a day. Working five days a week, I was probably getting 150–160 pages a week. I was really getting bogged down toward the end, because I was running out of inspiration for voices. I found I was repeating myself. There must have been 20 different sorts of Cockney accents I was doing there, trying to make each one different, giving them a lisp or sibilance or stammer, just to make variations on one particular accent."

Although Dotrice says he was responsible for coming up with his interpretation of the characters, he credits director Janet Stark with helping him keep the massive cast clear in his mind."I had to depend on her to a tremendous amount," he says. "And she was awfully good in this: She would make notes as to what character had what accent. You'd be reading Volume 3, and a certain character would appear on Page 3, and then he might not appear again until Page 253. Between [those two points] I had done over 100 different characters, so I'd have to go to Janet and ask, 'What sort of character was that, on Page 3 that we did?' She find out for me. That took a lot of time, obviously."

As to what talents an aspiring audio-book narrator requires, Reilly says being a good sight-reader is important, and knowing how to adjust performance levels for the more intimate environment of narration is useful, but recording skills are vital."Get as much experience recording things as possible, no matter what it is," she advises. "Audition for whatever kind of voiceover experience you can get, because I think you never know who's working on other kinds of projects. It's sort of inadvertent networking: You're working on one thing and have no idea that so-and-so is also producing other things. You're in [the recording booth] for hours and hours, so you have to know how to pace yourself."

Although Reilly finds audio-book narration challenging, she says she enjoys the experience. "It's kind of like when you're in a play, and you like your own part just fine, but you think, 'I could play all of these parts.'" she says. "In a way, this satisfies that fantasy, because you are playing all those parts. To a certain extent, you're also the director, the lighting designer.... You're everything, because you spin the whole story with what you do with the voices. It's like any actor's dream, because you're in charge of the whole experience for the listener."
BSW