Star Wars and Disney…held together by SKYPE!!!
A
few weeks ago was the 30th Anniversary of the launch of Star Wars (‘A
New Hope’ For you officianodos!), and Hullabaloo got to play a small role
- but important role.
We got a call from Burbank requesting a voice record session with
Jay Laga'aia, who’d be presenting a special events weekend at Disneyland.
Now, we have a great track record with Disney, and we’ve done a lot of
voice record work with them, but due to time constraints, this had to be
done over the phone.
So, we pulled out the old laptop and tried a new way to do this...using
Skype.
If you don’t know, Skype is a VOIP ‘internet telephone’ system. We
hadn’t done this before, but we’ve had a lot of success using Skype to
record phone interviews, so I figured we could ‘trick’ Skype into
thinking that’s what we were doing.
We had to get a clean feed of Jay voice to the producer in Florida, and
a production manager in Burbank. This was achieved by going through
their switchboard.
I also needed to talk to production and Jay, and we had to record Jay
only, edit this files and FTP them to Disney.
I connected the laptop to the Pro-tools just as I would the telephone.
However, Skype (or it’s recording partner ‘PAMELA’) has the option to
record both sides of a converstion on the left and right sides of a
file.
So,
I split these into separate outputs, sent them to various parts of the
sessions: to Jay as producer talkback, and to myself for engineer
instructions and general slagging off of the talent! Just kidding. That
NEVER happens!!!!!
I then mixed my talkback with Jay’s microphone and returned that to
the laptop, which sent it back to the USA as a normal return line down a
telephone.
Everything was crystal clearer. Cleaner, in fact than previous sessions
using a real phone!!
The production department heard Jay’s takes very clearly and was able to
make choices of takes on the fly (the yanks call them ‘KEEPERS’, as in,
“Hey, that’s a keeper”!!!).
The BIG thing was this…
The cost saving. The sessions went for two hours. A normal phone charge
would be ?? I dunno, lots. Skype cost 2.7 cents a minute. That’s not a
typo!!
$3.24 for two hours of international phone rates. Bet that’s pricked
your ears up!!!!
SKYPE.com Check it out.