Behind the Scenes: ADR with Disney Audio Legend Doc Kane

Wonderful behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of ADR - here noted engineer/ADR artist Doc Kane talks about the process and techniques of recording the vocals and voice tracks which are laid into films and animations.



Thanks to Sirenetta Leoni's "Inside Voiceover" for passing along this engaging video!

"I Know That Voice" Documentary Premieres in LA Tonight

Sadly, I'll be a few hundred miles away from this, but wishing I was there to see my heroes, friends and mentors share their insights, opinions and more than a few characters in "I Know That Voice" - a documentary by Lawrence Shapiro.



Tom Kenny, Charlie Adler, the amazing June Foray, Billy West, John DiMaggio, Andrea Romano, Maurice LaMarche, Rob Paulsen and many many more...

Wider distribution should happen through December and into January, 2014, and you can order the DVD at http://www.iknowthatvoice.com

More info:
http://www.animationmagazine.net/events/know-voice-doc-premiere-nov-6/

Interesting Mozilla/Epic Games Hack from GDC

Got steered to this via a TechCrunch feed. 

"...to show off what game developers can do with a modern browser and without plugins today, Mozilla and Epic teamed up a little while ago to port Unreal Engine 3 to the web, something that was unthinkable back in 2011.
As Vladimir Vukicevic, Mozilla’s engineering director and the inventor of WebGL told me earlier this week, Mozilla wants to make the web a viable platform for modern games. About six months ago, Mozilla started to work on using its emscripten compiler to port C and C++ code to asm.js, a strict subset of JavaScript. This combination allows the JavaScript code to run at a speed within 2x of native performance and the latest versions of Firefox Nightly now support these optimizations. Given the complexities of modern game engines and games, getting relatively close to native performance is a necessity for running something like Epic’s well-known Citadel demo and Unreal Tournament, which Mozilla showed running natively in the browser at the Game Developers Conference today."

It's pretty slick and smooth, as the video shows.



Innersting, innersting stuff...

Straight Outta Emeryville...

Nice little video via the NYT this morning - some glimpses of quality voice acting, cool studios and the amazing campus of Pixar.

An Evening With Billy West

Spent Friday evening down in Sausalito enjoying an interview with Billy West, who was in town at an "Inside the Voice Actor's Studio" event put on by Voicetrax. For the non-voiceover-centric among you, Billy West has voiced a chunk of memorable characters - (references here and here to get you started) such as Ren & Stimpy, several members of the Futurama cast, and currently the Red M&M on their television commercials.

Giving voice to cartoon and animated characters is a big chunk of the siren song which has drawn me to this line of work. The characters of Daws Butler, Mel Blanc and June Foray fired my imagination and became real to me because the actors behind the animation brought such depth to the characters (and the writing and situations were such inventive roller coasters of storytelling).

Billy has continued to bring the commitment to craft forward. It was a rare treat to listen to his rapid patter of reminisces and views. Character work is a tricky combination of physicality, mechanics, commitment and above all - acting. To pull all those things together is a bit of a magician's trick. To consistently do that over a period of time is significant work.

There were a myriad of ideas sown which I'm still considering this morning, inspiration which hopefully will carry my own energy forward a bit, and substantial laughter and love for the craft.

Big thanks to Voicetrax for pulling this together!