Now that the majority of our animation, filming and editing were complete we set about recording a voice-over for out video. After looking for several people and plans falling through it fell to me to be the voice behind our project. Although far from an ideal voice-over sound, it did end up helping with getting the right wording and inflections during the recording. For our set-up we had small sections of the finished animation playing while we talked over it to determine what would fit in. Gina had also gone through the Airbnb site and found some facts and shorts lines that they used that ended up being useful in informing our script.
For the actual recording I used a combination of my Tascam DR-40 voice recorder and a Audio Technica AT875r Shotgun mic. This set-up gave a narrow recording field to isolate my voice and 24bit, 92kHz uncompressed WAV files which are very versatile when edited.
Once we captured a good take of each portion of the voice-over we imported the clips and arranged them on our timeline. Minor levels adjustments were also made at this point to correct for me moving closer and further from the mic in between takes.
Now that the basics were in place we turned to fine adjustments of the tone of the voice-over. After some experimentation we settled on the following settings using the Parametric EQ function in After Effects:
A boost from 3Hz-3khz sweeping slowly up was first applied to make for the inherent low-cut of the mic we were using, and a sharper cut to the extreme end of the treble spectrum (16kHz upward) was used to reduce and sibilance (harsh 'S' sounds and sharp consonants) that crept is becuase of our lack of pop-filter. Overall I'm really pleased with how the voice-over went apart from the fact the we ended up having to use my own voice because of time restrictions.
