Sound Recording - Molly's got a voice!

Last Monday Scott Moyle (voice of Night of the Cephalopods) and I took a train to the depths of darkest Hamilton to do a recording session for Guerrilla Gardening at the Decoder Ring Theatre studio. For those of you who aren't familiar with  Decoder Ring Theatre, it's a present day podcast done in the style of old pulp radio plays from the early days of radio.  The writing is sharp and funny and the performances are quick and full of wry wit.  I've been a fan of the show long before I'd met Scott or any of the other cast members so it was a treat to see where it all gets made.

Those who are familiar with Decoder Ring Theatre will recognize the voice in the following clip as none other then Clarissa Der Nederlanden the 'Flying Squirrel' from The Red Panda Adventures and now the voice of Molly in our prototype:

Molly critiques a statue of General Bauhaus.

Allow me a little fanboy moment, but how frickin cool is that!?

Since this is all temporary audio for the prototype she's also voicing the female civilians:

A happy citizen is a rebellious citizen.

While Scott is voicing all the cops:

A cop finds something unexpected in his path.

...and male civilians:

A civilian admiring a flower.

We got through a ton of audio, much more then I thought we could, thanks to the help of Decoder Ring creator Gregg Taylor who manned the recording equipment.  A heroic effort given he'd recently thrown his back.

There is now so much audio that it will be impossible for us to get it all in before I leave for the Game Developers Conference.   However we easily have our vocal needs covered for the rest of the prototyping period, including stuff like interactive tutorials if we have time  (a bit of an extravagance for a prototype, but good for testing with people new to the game).

I have a bunch of thoughts on the recording and writing process for the prototype but I'm going to keep this short and save that for another post.

Note: Wordpress seems to have added some crackle and pop to the playback,  rest assured  the originals are nice and clean.