Friday Fun – Andy Marriott and the Central tea tray…

I’d forgotten about this one, till Trish Bertram reminded me. My old mate and colleague, Andy Marriott, from his days at Central Television in Birmingham (circa 1999, I’d guess by the ident in use?)

A great example of what can happen when a nutty announcer finds a co-operative transmission controller to help out. Happy days…

Any more? Keep them coming! And have a great weekend!

Friday Fun – Mitchell and Webb do Sky Sports!

Sky Sports’ promotion effort is, to use the words of one popular UK retailer, “never knowingly undersold”. For years a large percentage of Sky’s promos have been voiced by one man: London-based Bruce Hammal. Bruce has a terrific and instantly recognisable signature voice, and he’s the one you’ll hear telling you that “live from the Sky News centre, this is Live at Five”, amongst other things.

But a pedigree such as his is ripe for rip-off, as demonstrated here by David Webb in the BBC’s “That Mitchell and Webb Look” in 2008…

“The giants of Charlton play host to the titans of Ipswich (making them both seem normal-sized…)”

Send me your suggestions for Friday Fun voiceover clips using the Comments field below – and have a great weekend!

Friday Fun – the all-action Almera!

Not strictly a voiceover parody this week, but a great ad from a few years back that made me laugh out loud. I give you Nissan’s “all-action Almera”, in the style of The Sweeney…

“You’re so uptight, Guv!”

“YES! Even my hair’s tense!”

Share your favourite voiceover spoofs and parodies via the Comments field and add to the Friday fun next week. Have a great weekend!

Film24 Promos Online

The nice boys at Film24 have been kind enough to send me some of the promos I’ve been voicing recently. Here’s one now…

You can find more from Film24 on Sky channel 157 and on their website at Film24.com

And you can see more of my promos on my facebook page – just click on the “Video” tab at the top of the page. You can also sign up as a “fan” if you like!

The paperless voiceover

For some time now I’ve been operating my voiceover business in a largely paperless environment. Sure, I still print out copies of invoices, remittance notes and the like for the benefit of my company accountant (who likes a paper file), but when I upgraded my voiceover booth last year I made a point of installing a flat panel computer monitor at eye height, with the intention of moving away from printing scripts and carrying them with me into the studio.

How does this work in practice? Well, it has its plusses and minuses.

On the plus side, I haven’t had to buy a ream of paper in quite a while, and my outlay for inkjet cartridges is at an all-time low. It’s also a lot quieter to use the scroll wheel on my cordless mouse to advance my way through the script than it is to turn a page, and it saves space as I don’t have to have a script holder propped up on top of my equipment rack.

On the negative side, it’s harder to annotate scripts with inflection marks and so on, though using bold, italics, underlining and highlighting go some way to making up for that. And for a while it wasn’t quite as easy as I’d have liked in terms of getting scripts from the Mac in my office to the PC in my voice booth. The first workaround for this was to give the booth its own email address and forward anything I needed in there to it. Then along came Dropbox, which has been one of my favourite tools of recent times and probably the thing which has changed the way I work most this year.

Dropbox is an online service – and free to use for someone at my level of usage – which allows you to deposit files in folders and then have them “mirrored” on all of your machines. So, I have a folder called “Scripts”, and when one comes in I just save it to that folder on the Mac. By the time I’ve walked through to the booth there’s a message telling me that Dropbox has updated the folder, and the script is good to go. This also means that I can make changes on one machine and then see them on the other before I start work.

Share and share alike

Dropbox also has a facility to share folders with other people. I work as a continuity announcer for Film24 (Sky 157), and I share those duties with two other voiceover artists: one in London and one in the Lake District. On an almost daily basis, cue sheets are emailed out to us for use when writing and recording the links for the channel. For months, we were constantly trying to keep our own individual systems up-to-date using email folders and there was a weekly round of “Has anyone seen a cue sheet for ‘x’?” Not anymore: I now manage a shared folder which allows us to keep a central repository of cue sheets, which has saved everyone a lot of time.

To cap it all, Dropbox now has a free iPhone application available too, which adds some nice features like picture sharing and so on.

But I’m getting off-topic. The fact is that I now print very little, and read from the screen a lot. I just set my audio recording software running, switch to my word processor and begin work, which speeds up the process and does a little bit for the planet in the process.

If you’ve got any stories to share, I’d love to hear them as always!

Friday Fun – Pinky and the Brain take on Orson Welles

Last week I brought you the famous Orson Welles “Frozen Peas” clip, and I promised that this week I’d bring you a reply to it. In this clip from the Warner Bros “Animaniacs” series, Maurice LaMarche brilliantly spoofs Orson Welles’s descent into despair in a Pinky and the Brain “mockumentary”.

I trawled the internet for this, as the YouTube video has been removed “due to a copyright violation”, which seems a shame as it’s a classic. My advice? Watch this while you can – but make sure you listen to the Orson Welles clip first, if you haven’t already!

“Get me a jury and show me how you can say in July and I’ll… make cheese for ya!” Nice twist for kids telly, compared to the original!

If you know of any great comic voiceover clips or spoofs, let me know using the comments field below and I’ll share them next time. Meantime, have a great weekend!

Friday Fun – Orson Welles and the frozen peas

This week’s Friday Fun isn’t a spoof at all (though it’s provided the material to spawn plenty!)

The date of the recording is uncertain, but it’s utterly timeless, regardless. The late Orson Welles was hired by Findus to voice a series of television advertisements for their range of frozen peas, and it’s great example of what happens when voice acting goes bad. Listen, as we venture where egos dare…

“Get me a jury and show me how you can say in July and I’ll go down on you!” Classic…

You can read more about the clip at Wikipedia, and next week I’ll bring you probably the most famous reply to this piece of voice acting history. Until then, have a great weekend and remember to share any great voiceover clips you know of by dropping me a line!

Friday Fun – 5 Men and a Limo

Last week and a fortnight ago in Friday Fun, we met Hal Douglas and the late, great Don LaFontaine in spoof spots. But “nothing could ever prepare you for what awaits you” in “5 Men and a Limo”…

Featuring Don LaFontaine, the voice of Hal Douglas (he doesn’t appear!), as well as John Leader, Nick Tate, Mark Elliot, and Al Chalk, it’s quite a production number.

Read more about the clip at Wikipedia, and as ever – if you know of any more great voiceover spoofs – let me know and I’ll share them right here! Meanwhile, have a great weekend!

Friday Fun – “I like it in here!”

Following on from last week’s Friday fun, and in much the same vein, here’s Hal Douglas at work on a movie trailer for Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedian”…

“No, I like it in here!”

If you know of any more fun voiceover clips then drop me a line – I’d love to share them. Meantime, have a great weekend!

Friday Fun – In a World Without Don LaFontaine

This week’s Friday Fun comes courtesy of the late Don LaFontaine, who died a year ago this coming Tuesday. Instantly familiar to audiences worldwide and a true voiceover business pioneer, Don was never afraid to parody himself. RIP, Don!

Know of anymore great comic voice acting clips? Drop me a line and I’ll be only too happy to share them! Meantime, have a great weekend!