I also needed to carry out ADR for the Giant’s grunts in my Iron Giant redesign. Learning how to make his voice sound professional and suited was important to the quality of my redesign, and therefore achieving learning outcomes 1 and 3. Logically, the character would make low-end iron/metal bangs and deep, distorted robotic grunts, so this is the style of ADR I aim to create for his voice.
I conducted research along the lines of monsters voices and vocalisations and found some interesting techniques to experiment with in my works. After recording your original roar recordings (your own voice for example) my research suggested to pitch shift, time shift and distort the sounds. Obviously the better the performance during ADR the more authentic the dialogue will sound, so this is something I will bare in mind when recording. Other interesting techniques my research suggested were Vocoding and Formant Morphing. Both can be used to blend two sounds and their characteristics with each other. For example, a human voice with an animal sound. I had previously read about this technique of layering with animal sounds from sound designer Jeff Shiffman, and this article of vocoding and formant morphing is a way for me to experiment with this. Simple, vocoding transfers the filter characteristics/modulation of one sound (voice, mouth) to another (Tiger growl). I will experiment with software called Waldorf Lector and Sugar Bytes Robotroni for Vocoding. Formant Morphing, however, I will use to seamlessly blend sound characteristics between each other.
Overall, the dialogue needed for the Giant is not extravagantly alien, extra terrestrial or even that different to a humans voice. However, he does need to sound like a scary, huge iron figure. So these are techniques I will use to get this deep voice after recording ADR.
References
- Andersen, A. 2015. How To Create Sound Effects That Are Truly Scary. [Online] Available at: https://www.asoundeffect.com/how-to-create-horror-sound-effects/. [Accessed: 22 April 2017].