Remember all the trouble I’ve been having trying to make Anakin’s voice sound natural, as though it was part of the movie to begin with? No matter what I did, it still had a flat, voice-over quality. I even rerecorded most of the lines, and although they were better, it still had that voice-over feeling.
Well, I just figured it out on accident. It’ll mean recording all of Anakin’s lines again, but this will be the last time.
What I did was run the mic to a Marantz unit for recording (then I can get it onto the PC via USB). But rather than setting a constant recording level, I found a setting where the unit automatically responds to changes in the recording input level. Why this changes the sound of the recordings so dramatically, I don’t know. But it definitely has that on-set movie sound. I’ve just run through a few scenes using this setting and dropped them into the movie and the improvement is ridiculous. It sounds absolutely natural and I didn’t even have to do anything to the recordings other than an occasional high-pass using the parametric filter.
I think that all the people who complained about the voice when the teaser trailer and the nightclub clip came out are going to be very pleasantly surprised. I’m 100% sure I did it this time.
Obviously it’s going to take a little longer to rerecord the lines and put them into the mix, but I think it’s absolutely worth it. This was the factor that this whole project depended on, and I’ve finally figured it out
If only I known before….
I’ll try and post a clip or two in the next few days to show you.