Me a wrestler? LOL…not a prayer. Oh, when I was in High School back in Fort Worth, I did the obligatory Greco-Roman wrestling that the Tarrant County School Board required of kids my age as part of the Physical Education program. I even toyed with the idea of joining my school’s team for a brief time, but the coach disabused me of that notion pretty quickly. I was the president of my Drama club which was much more suitable, given my skill set. (I could act like a wrestler and make people believe it, but doing the “chicken-wing” was really NOT my thing.)
A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a dear friend, Mitchell Stuart at HQ Productions, who wanted me to do the voice and sound design for a TV commercial he was designing. After running everything through Hoss (my agent at Atlas Talent), I was on. The client was THQ, the video gaming giant with a brand new version of a top-seller, WWE. (In spite of the similarity in names, THQ is NOT related to HQ.) This incarnation of the game (#12) introduces Brock Lesnar to their collection and will go on sale in November.
Understand, aside from my brief HS career, my wrestling qualifications for doing a spot like this boils down to meeting Hulk Hogan once. He came into the station a few years ago, helping his daughter Brooke promote her single release. (By the way, he’s a really nice guy and Brooke was a lot of fun.) But I have certainly seen enough to have a sense of where this little movie needed to be, sound-wise. I got clearance from Robert Dudzic to use some Trynity HD/FX effects and music and was ready to rumble, so to speak.
As is the case generally, I received a link for an MOV file which had a scratch audio track on it, including Brock’s on-camera voice. This was so I could build the audio track with his voice and keep everything in sync. There were also a few effects in the audio that they had thrown in to give me an idea about what they were thinking when they built the video. I imported the video and audio to a new PT session and began. I ripped Brock’s VO out of the scratch track and married it to mine and then threw the mix up to the video producer, Alex Dolginko for re-syncing and publishing to the THQ folks for approval.
To say that we got approval really doesn’t tell the story. I think they were genuinely thrilled with the results. They had to make an adjustment to the video, adding actual game footage, which meant I had to make an adjustment to the audio, but once we re-synced again…it was a go. It hit their website this morning so I thought I’d post it here as well.
If you can, put the sound up on a big system so you get the full impact. 111006thq-BrockRevealFinal
I know this site is all about production and voice work but, if you are a fan of WWE, I’m sure THQ wouldn’t mind if you bought a copy. LOL
Hi Dave,
You have a great blog, you’re a really cool guy!
I want to share with you his idea of voice processing.
It all:
I take a clear voice, purify it, compress.
After that, I made copies of the processed voice and send them to the two additional tracks. I’m move it one track to the left, the other – to the right, moving left track approximately a 0.021sec to back and right track i moving a 0.021sec on right. In addition, both of these tracks I’m sending on the compressor and EQ, where they partially cut frequency from 1000 Hz.
It turns out that something like this: http://radiovufe.ru/vox4DF.mp3
What can you say about this? Should I treat this way the voice?
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with greetings from Russia!
I don’t know if I’ve written about it on this blog or not (I cover so many subjects), but I know I’ve written about it before, perhaps in my monthly RAP column. This is a tremendous way to “fatten” the voice in a promo that works every time. I recommend it highly.
There IS an easier way to do it though. If you get a stereo plug-in that will give you a short DELAY, simply slow down the left track 20ms and the right track 40ms, then set the mix to 30% or so and it will work. If it’s a good plug-in, you’ll also be able to adjust the EQ as you described. While it’s true that one of the virtual tracks does not happen before the main track, the overall effect is quite nearly identical.
Congratulations Andrew for finding this amazing little trick. Your track sounds great!
Dave, thank you for your good reviews of my sound.
I just wanted to ask you all to give your colleagues some advice.
Maybe this is not something new in the radio industry, but it to me a very interesting way to process voice. In the website http://panthersounds.com/content/tracks.asp?search=1&searchtext=&fx=1&music=0&tag1=1&tag2=1&tag3=1&tag4=1&tag5=1&tag6=1&tag7=1&tag8=1&tag9=1&tag10=1&tag11=1&tag12=1&tags=1&key=0&bpm=0&length=0 I hear a new sound for themselves.
Voice of men a very juicy and stylish. When I looked at the diagram, I realized that the voice is not very much the compressed.
Please tell me, how is it that creates such a voice?