Over the past 2 weeks, the Roast-It-Notes team has done two recording sessions to start getting our audio assets for the radio show of the game.
Calm is Key
The most important thing to keep in mind during these sessions was to keep the 'voice actor' as calm as possible. Because the people creating the assets are games students and not used to being recorded, at first they could be quite shy and tentative of getting into a scripted character, especially since it is meant to be humorous.
a copy of some of our script
Therefore, I noticed that we had to pay extra attention to how our games team felt, and if there was anything to make them feel more comfortable. This was different for each person, for example some preferred to stand in front of the mic, some to sit on a stool, some liked having the lights off, some to face away from the window into the console room, etc. They also all spoke at different volumes (some had a stronger/louder voice than others) so gain structure had to be monitored as well.
All in all I am very happy with the outcomes of our recording session. We did our best to make sure we got the most authentic radio-sounding voices we could, even before we got to post. We did this by using different kinds of microphones depending on the speaker's role in the radio show. For a crisp presenter's voice, we used an RE20 (Electrovoice), which is a dedicated voice-over mic. For voices that were to be used as a call-in, we used a Copperphone Mini (Placid Audio), which operates within a limited bandwidth and doesn't pick up bass frequencies, giving the effect of a voice coming through a telephone. An AKG 414 was also used for any time that we wanted a warmer sounding voice (for example to be used in 'advertisements' in between our other scripted interactions).
We did still do some work in post however, the details of which can be found here.
The next step is to implement the sounds we record into FMOD. FMOD is an integration platform that helps create interactive sound design to be used for games, and will help the game mechanics release the audio in a way that is realistic and natural.
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