With a final manuscript for “The Accent“, it was finally time for the voiceover recording session. This is where we voice the characters and narration for the story. Weeks before, Steffan La Touche and I had sorted out the logistics of getting the talented cast to his Happy Accident Studio. Tucked between the hills of rural Nottingham, it was a perfect escape for the entire team who were coming in from different cities.
The voiceover session was exciting for obvious reasons. It was the first in-person meeting for the cast. I used the opportunity to share a background on the story and more importantly, how our presence reflected the wider goal of Wafunk Publishing – an intersection of different worlds/generations/cultures that each of us represents.
Kathryn Haywood Ryan
Kathryn, our lead voiceover actor voices the narrator and Caroline’s mom. She is a professional voiceover artist, actor and singer with 20 years of experience to her credit. Raised in Hong Kong, Kathryn started acting at the age of 4. Her voiceover career includes video games, toys and Japanese anime cartoons. Some of her notable roles include voicing Princess Ariel in The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Majestic Journey. You can read more about Kathryn on her website.
Under Steffan’s guidance, we had a initial run through the script to get everyone at ease. From then on, it was all fun with subsequent voiceovers. The girls had to iterate over a few lines to emphasise the mood or tone of the characters in the story.
What were the hurdles faced?
Reflecting on the voiceover session, there were a few hurdles that we had to navigate as follows. The major hurdle was the casting. In keeping with the core principle of the series to celebrate our unique values, we had to cast actors that best represented the theme of the story. Finding local Brits wasn’t an issue for obvious reasons; production was here in the UK. However, it was a different reality finding casts with African backgrounds who still had their native accents. I had to step in to play Funke’s dad for that reason. Deola who played Funke is a member of my Church and given she’d only recently moved to the UK, she also had elements of her native accent. Without that, we’d have had to search far and wide for the cast or as was alternatively suggested, work with a remote cast based in Nigeria. The latter wasn’t appealing as I didn’t want to sacrifice the value of having in-person casts.
Another hurdle was walking around Kathryn’s busy schedule and making sure the date and time suited Fifi and Deola’s school schedule. When we finally settled for a Saturday, we got wind of a train strike days before and had to reschedule to about a week after during weekdays. That had an impact on our production timeline as the creative director had to rework the timetable. So, in animation, certain things can only proceed after some other steps. In this case, we needed the voiceover to be done before we could move on to animatics – a rough animation of the final version using the exact audio to probably identify the timing and length of certain assets. What we did was move other tasks forward without necessarily impacting our scheduled timeline.
Next Steps
Following the success of the voiceover session, Steffan worked on editing the audio files. Production continues with the animation team working to finalize the animatics. The journey is in the reward, hence the voiceover session is a huge milestone in our production pipeline. Sign up for updates as we keep you posted on our progress.
