Picking a voice

Over the course of the animation, something that has always been playing on my mind was who would be narrating the audio to my film with reading the poem. 

Initially, I had thought about asking a child from a drama school, but I felt while animating the actual piece that I wanted a voice that was unpolished, possibly stuttering, shy and sensitive, which would match  the context of the poem.

It struck me when walking through the playground of Hungerford school, (which is attached to the workshop) to see if any of the children would suit the role. Who could bring the right shy emotional feeling of the audio I was looking for,

I asked the school and they suggested a year 4 group’s as they would be the most qualified for reading.

This was a really interesting, casting the class as the teacher asked them to read out a line. It was engaging to hear all the different voices of the children and the characters they could be. There were three children that stood out to me as having the right sound for the storyline feeling, both shy, nervous or stuttering in the pronunciation of the words.

In some ways the sound of there voices were quite similar, as they where all boys that had a quiet disposition, sounded young and with a relatively neutral tone, that I was looking for.

Picking between the voices was more of a difficult task as they all has positive and negative qualities when I auditioned them.

 Voice options

-Chris

-Voice has a charm with the slight lisp

-and a higher lift at the end of sentences.

-Sounds very young and cutesy

-Struggles with reading words and pronunciation

-Kan

- Very quiet in the way he speaks and timid sounding

- Tended to get quieter with the lines and use of words

- When he speaks louder has a bit of of a dry sound

- Had difficulties with the bigger words

-Ron

-More of a cleared pronunciation in the words 

-There is a nervousness in the voice

-Slight lisp on letter “s”

-More of a sad undertone.

-Who's voice stood out

Chris
 voice was most infant like and had a cute lisp in his pronunciation

-who had the most character

Kan

-who read the lines the best

Ron understanded lines best

Which matched the context of the story

Ron was able to read through the story and struggled less with unfamiliar words and so was able to focus more on telling the narrative. His voice may not have been as cute as Chris or as in character as Kan which had a quiet disposition, but overall they struggled with telling the narrative of the story.