Here's an interesting case study!

 

I was recently approached by a production company to help them with a large project for Lloyds Bank. The project was an online staff incentive/initiative media experience. The main aim was to allow staff members to hear from more experienced and senior members of staff about their positive experiences working for Lloyds, with a view to inspire and motivate newer staff members.

To this end, a number of employees were interviewed, and the interviews were transcribed into scripts.

Our brief – to find 18 voice actors to each play one of the parts. The tricky bit? The voices had to sound authentic and natural – as if spoken by the real people themselves. Also, they needed to represent a wide cross section of society and ethnicities/accents. So I knew I needed to find talented actors for this one.

And we had a couple of weeks to audition, cast, record, produce the audio and deliver to the client.

All in the middle of a pandemic.

So the hunt was on.

So what were the main challenges?

Well firstly, the pandemic at that time meant that we were restricted to our local areas. Travel wasn't allowed. I knew I would never find all the talent I needed within a few miles of Woking and that I would have to cast the net wider, which presented a problem when my recording studio is in Woking.

I had to find great actors, with professional home studios and the capability of recording while simultaneously hooking up with me and my client for direction.

 

I sent out a call for submissions – a very wide net was cast, we were even accepting submissions from overseas. A sample script was sent out to all who came back to us, so they could record their auditions. There were two things to look at when reviewing the audition tapes that came in. Firstly, we needed to hear that the recording set-ups that the talent had were of adequate quality to be used in a high profile media project, and secondly, how did they read? Could they create the natural, very understated reads that we were looking for? As a voice actor, one of the hardest things to do is to read a script and make it sound natural, like a real person is speaking these words for the first time. So we had our work cut out for us! But we like a challenge...

 

So there were 18 parts to cast. Amazingly we were inundated with submissions for the roles. I received over 100 submissions (!) from all over the UK and beyond. And so began the casting process. I was able to shortlist around 40 actors. I was super pleased at the quality of the readings, and also the diversity of the applications. Inclusion and integration is very important to us here at The Voice Reel Studio and it was a joy to cast voices from many ethnicities and also UK regions.

 

Once I had shortlisted, around 40 candidates were submitted to my client in the first few days of the process for them to review, and also send to the team at Lloyds for final okays on who they would like to voice the roles.

 

Once that was done, I had the wonderful job of calling the lovely voice actors and let them know they had got the job. It's literally the best part of my job here at TVRS – it's a lovely feeling to call an actor and tell them they got the part.

 

So! Onto the next phase - are you still with me? I promise we're near the end...

 

So our lovely actors had been cast, the next phase of the process was to schedule in and arrange the recording sessions. Some were local to Woking, so they could come to me at TVRS to record the session, but most were using their own home-recording set-ups, recording remotely from all over the UK.

This part of the project went really well, we were able to schedule in recording sessions for everyone very quickly indeed. For the sessions, we all hooked up via Zoom. So we could interact with and direct the talent in real time. Also on each call was my client Ben Burman, the creative expert behind the whole project, from Experience Creative Production Agency.
Ben and I guided and directed each voice actor during the sessions. We were incredibly pleased with the talent on show, there were quite a few one or two-take-wonders! The talent we chose was so slick and professional, we even started a competition to see who could nail their session in the shortest time! I think the record was a lengthy 8 minutes from hello to goodbye! Incredible.

 

Once the sessions were all recorded, I had the audio sent to me for final edit and mastering, and then we sent the finished audio straight to Ben at Experience so they could edit them straight into the online interactive for Lloyds.

 

It was a massive sense of achievement for us at The Voice Reel Studio. The time-scale from when we started work on the project to when the final voiceover was delivered to our client was just 9 days. 9 days to find, audition, cast, record and produce 18 voices.

We were especially pleased that we were able to do this in a record time, as we delivered the project well ahead of our client's deadline, meaning they could stay ahead of their production schedule too.

 

The final project was a great success, and we are very proud here at The Voice Reel Studio to have been involved with such a fab process.