Today I did some voiceover recording for MTV’s show Teen Mom 2‘s Kailyn Lowry. MTV had been looking for a studio closer to Kailyn’s home to do her voice work for the show, and approached me about doing the work a few days ago.
One requirement was that I have a phone patch going into the vocal booth so the director in New York could listen in and contribute suggestions as the script was being read. I quickly Macgyver-ed a POTS phone patch circuit with some Radio Shack isolation transformers and spare wire, and, amazingly, the thing worked well! (Pat myself on the back.) Everything went smoothly, with Kailyn taking direction from the show’s director in NY over her headphones while I engineered the session.
I’ve done lots of VO work before (commercials, political ads, film post-production), but never did the phone patch thing! Now the jerry-rigged phone patch will be replaced with something a little more substantial, and the studio will be ready for more phoned-in direction.
We’ve done three sessions so far, one session per episode. We’re tracking the VO, editing and organizing the takes (sometimes over 150 clips per session), and uploading the .wav files to the New York-based post production company’s FTP site.
When I first started the project, I didn’t realize how close to the wire the producers were cutting it, but we generally record the voice-overs only a day or two before the episode airs! One reason for keeping it so close to the wire is to keep the episodes’ contents fresh and up-to-date trying to stay as close as possible to a real timeline as the program follows the Kailyn through her everyday life.
Finished the season, and looking forward to doing more voice over work with Kailyn & MTV in a few weeks.