An Australian, a Canadian and a bunch of Americans walk into a bar. Drama ensues...

The original idea came while killing time in a doctors waiting room 'Maybe I should write a performance piece.' More than a year later the idea just take it further than a corner of this blog came randomly when chatting at work,

'I wonder what it would sound like recorded up?'

And lo and behold I've found out in a project to put my words into action (and sound). What an incredible learning journey it's been too!

THESE WATERS ARE UNFAMILIAR..

Ahh the wonderful world of voice acting/casting/production.

I've worked with sound recording and production for a while but in an advertising sense and it was trying to get clients to get sound even slightly excited about how much a kilo of sausages were. 

Which depending on the client was occasionally a challenge. 

Getting someone to 'ooze out as much sleaze as possible' was a first. As was playing casting director in general. Oh and producer. But boy was it fun!

The folder full of work parts got larger and larger as the weeks went on..

-I started on a comedy forum looking for voices (in a thread about voice acting) then got directed to a discord channel (also about voice acting) and then through Twitter. I found great voices through all and learnt to put the ad for casting everywhere.

-People read the wanted ad and expressed enthusiasm about voicing a part and then would fade in the darkness and never be heard from again. One guy messaged me with 'Give me a sec' and that was three and a half weeks ago (I hope he hasn't been working on his audition for that long, I finished casting a week ago...) You get a lot of positivity but it doesn't always translate into thousand of voices. 

-Writing a script was one thing, writing a script that was easy to perform...well that was another. There were plenty of on the fly script edits before getting them voiced after voicing them out loud and really struggling to make them flow. 

Read your stuff out loud people, it makes all the difference. 

-The voice you have in your head of how your characters should sound is never going to be the same in the heads of the people voicing it. And in some cases, what they come up with is even better to begin with. Hence why the Russian character is now French (and also because I couldn't find anyone attempting a Russian accent) and why the Captain has gone from Male to Female. Because Nikki asked if she could voice it and sent through an awesome demo which erased any doubts I had whatsoever - Captain Chambers is now a hard ass woman.

She's got balls. Wait..

-On the back of accents, some words are super tricky when trying to be a different nationality

-Some voice actors would need a few days to get things through, some took a few minutes. One completely ad-libbed a section and created a couple of laughs so I threw that in too. No two voice actors are the same...and that's a good thing.  

-'I don't know what I'm going to get offering just $5 per voice.' It turns out people are very happy to receive beer money on account of how many voice artist gigs that are out there paying nothing. All in all this first episode has set me back the monetary equivalent of a couple of basic pizzas. Coin well spent really. 

-Laying it all out in Sony Vegas (an editing program I'm getting the hang of) means I've heard it a million times while it's being built and this always starts the niggling doubt 'But is it still entertaining?'. Oh well, I still got it done (and hopefully it is!)

AND HERE IT TIS!

First episode of Space D.I.R.T and hopefully many more to come! If you enjoyed it I'd love you to like and subscribe via Youtube which is very encouraging. If you didn't well thanks so much for swinging by and checking it out anyway!

Onto the next episode! Now where did I put that directors cap..

On a completely unrelated note, my first book The Adventures of Almigo is now free (if you're in the US). And there's no time limit on it either so grab it and laugh at your leisure.