FINDING my VOICE

Christine asked “When are you going to do an AV with all that Indian stuff? You have thousands of pictures, just sitting there” (This is not strictly true, as they have served to illustrate my cruise and other talks fairly lavishly over the years.) “Yet another travelogue?” said I “No, there are plenty of those on offer. I’ll give it some thought…”

The result was a complicated thing about the signicance of wheels in India – spiritual, commercial and practical. It was intentionally not a narrative – more a series of observations –an uncommon format in Western culture. The nearest parallel I could think of was a ‘sutra’. (the most famous of these is of course the Kama Sutra, which isn’t just an erotic handbook, but a very profound exploration of the arts of courtship and love.)

All well and good, but it had to have a voice, an Indian-sounding voice. Whose? Not me, that’s for sure, although I do love doing my own voiceovers!

Via a whole string of contacts I ended up corresponding with a chap at Birmingham City University, who said he knew someone, and furthermore he would mobilise his students to do the recording as a project, complete with sound studio facilities. The students came and talked it through. After a few emails from them, nothing further happened.

Next someone suggested Fiverr. That’s an on-line facility that nds people to do various small jobs – including audio-typing, graphic design and voiceovers. I found this guy who sounded perfect, with a rich dark Indian voice. But his sample piece was very much the kind of thing you hear in an Indian TV commercial, and when he recorded my script it was totally lacking in warmth and nuance. I paid him off and searched again. Another chap from Fiverr was full of enthusiasm, but he couldn’t cut it either. He offered to do it again for free, following my dummy recording of how it should sound. Still no good!

I’d attended some excellent talks on lm and video technique, and the teacher suggested ‘Shooting People’ – another web-based organisation that brings together young professionals, wannabees and serious amateurs from all aspects of movie-making, keen to show their talents for little more than expenses and a credit.

I quickly had a response from a professional actor who seemed keen to help. He would be working in Birmingham (on a well-known soap as I recall) and could come to Worcester to do a quick recording. He did a dummy run of my script on his ‘phone, which sounded absolutely ideal, though certainly not good enough technically.

The weeks went by, and I heard nothing more from him – obviously a busy fellow! Slowly it dawned that he was too busy to do my ve minutes of voiceover. Another blow.

Next a doctor acquaintance of one of Christine’s ex-colleagues undertook to have a go. A stunningly glamorous lady arrived at our friend’s house, and she tackled the recording with great condence. The result was certainly not lacking in clarity – she sounded “as if she were addressing a public meeting” (as I believe Queen Victoria once said of Gladstone.)

We were soon due to return yet again to India, so I took my script with me, in the hope that we would nd someone there. India is full of Indian-sounding people after all!

I made three different versions of the v/o there, with three different guides and drivers – one of them an old friend from a previous trip. All were wellspoken but not able to deliver my words with uency and meaning. It cost me thousands of rupees in thankyous.

Finally, I came to accept the truth of the saying “ If you want a job done properly, do it yourself. ”

Back home I tried again, making a trip to London especially to record one of the staff at the TransIndus ofce – they’ve made the travel arrangements for our Indian trips for many years. Still not right – lacking in expression.

Without more ado, I settled down early one morning in my usual comfy recording set-up, took out my teeth (for the second time in the cause of art and artistry) and, trying to sound more like the Mahatma Gandhi and not too much like Peter Sellers, I recorded the whole damn thing myself.

The resulting voice-over was maybe not quite as authentic as I would have liked, but at least I spoke the words on which I had lavished so much care in the way I wanted them to be heard, and my efforts were not entirely in vain – on its rst outing it received a Highly Commended from the three generous and sympathetic judges.