MAKING OF: Cleric Gives Barbarian Dating Advice

I thought I would start writing about my creative/production process for the content I post.

Note: I am under no illusion that there are people clamoring for this, either my content or an inside look to my process. I am doing this so that A) I can understand my own process, B) I can build a habit of creating content to create intentional serendipity. I can only hope that maybe it will also help someone else.

I saw this Twitter post the other day from ThatBoomerKid:

It made me giggle.

Generally speaking, if I have a reaction to something, whether it be laughing or otherwise, it grabs my attention. (This is a key element to all good storytelling.)

In this case, I could almost hear the characters’ voices in my mind. I have a voice I’ve used in other videos that really sounded like the cleric in this case, and another that, with some modulation, would be the barbarian.

I played around with the voices a bit, printed out the text, and jumped into my recording booth here at Dirty 20 Studio (my home studio) and hit record on my DAW (digital audio workstation, Audacity in my case) and my cell phone to capture the video.

So here can be a bit of a problem, as I capture the audio separate from my video. Sure, I could just use the audio from my phone, but as I’m a voice actor and I’m focusing on sound above all else, I want to make sure that the sound is as high-quality as possible, and a cell phone mic just won’t cut it.

The two need to be synced up. I use an old movie trick for when they couldn’t get the clapper into the shot: I clap. Here’s how that works:

I clean up the audio in Audacity, import the video and audio files into Hitfilm Express, sync everything up, and delete the cell phone audio. Then I link the audio and video so that they won’t move independently of each other, guaranteeing that they stay in sync.

Then I edit the video down, add in some captioning that I produce in GIMP (I’m all about the free applications), render the video, and share it.

Here’s the finished product for this project: