With the debut of the final film in the Harry Potter series, I reminisced recently about the great narration by Jim Dale, the 1980 Tony-award winning actor of Barnum, co-starring Glenn Close. Jim Dale’s great character voices brought all the wizards and muggles and the magical world of Harry Potter to life so beautifully. His numerous character voices were distinct, perfect in emotion and tempo, as was his compelling “narrator” voice.
I genuinely love audiobooks. By the end of the day, my eyes are tired and having a story read to me is one of the few harmless indulgences I enjoy. Unfortunately, as a voiceover, I’m a little picky about my narrators. I don’t like overacting, not in audiobooks or on the screen. The stage is different, but audio and screen acting are more intimate. In the Potter series, Jim Dale keeps a story that could easily lend itself to exaggeration intimate and real.
Watch Jim Dale in action for yourself in this short video as he narrates Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, the 2009 Winnie-the-Pooh novel by David Benedictus. Dale is truly amazing:
Hey, September is National Voiceover Appreciation Month. Who knew?! OK well, maybe it’s a little navel gazy. But I don’t just do voiceovers, I hear them too. I’m informed and entertained by voice actors every day. So since it is Voiceover Appreciation Month, here’s a list of just a few of my favorite voiceovers — in the order in which they popped into my head:
Antonio Banderas’ Nasonex commercials
Antonio Banderas’ voiceovers in the Shrek movies
All the voices in Monsters, Inc., especially Bob Peterson’s Roz
Ellen DeGeneres in Finding Nemo, and really all the other voices from that film
Robin Williams in Happy Feet and the Latino penguin rappers: “Soy tu Papi pingüino. . .”
Majel Barrett Rodenberry for one of the best computer voices in space, you know, the final frontier
Jim Dale’s narration for the Harry Potter audiobooks
The female voice talent who did the Word 2007 and other Office 2007 tutorials on Microsoft’s site (tutorials can be grueling with bad or sing-songy voices)
Mel Blanc’s Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweetie and other Looney Tune voices (I finally bought the Golden Collection DVDs)
Listening is becoming a lost art now that we live in the Age of Distractions. I really do appreciate all those voices who compel me to listen at least a little better.
Buying an iPad has been an unanticipated benefit for my voiceover business. I no longer print my scripts. I just email them to my iPad account and it reads any attachment: doc, docx, xml, pdf. Nice!
But my flash-based audio players disappeared from my website! Not nice. Since I had never joined the iPhone bandwagon, I didn’t know until recently that my voiceover demos weren’t available to web visitors coming to my site from their iPhones, or from iPads which use the iPhone OS. People could download my demos, but I didn’t even add download links until earlier this year! And none of my profiles on the voice marketplaces I’m still affiliated with currently use supported audio players. That’s particularly unfortunate for paying subscribers.1
I know what you’re thinking: what’s the big deal, Nikki? Your flashy audio players work just fine in Internet Explorer and hardly anyone uses their iPhone for surfing the web. And Steve Jobs will eventually cave in and support flash on the iPhone OS. Yes, and crude oil will become water soluble.
Like most of my hungry voiceover colleagues, I would like my website to work as well as it can on whatever devices or browser a site visitor uses. In fact, many of my new contact emails are coming from iPhone users. And this was before my upgrade.
So here is the upgrade, a cleaner design with a bit more contrast and these few content coding changes:
A background image behind the flash player on my home page so that iPhone visitors don’t see a big empty space.
Html audio tags with embedded audio. This required minimal coding and the addition of .ogg versions of my demos for browsers that don’t support .mp3 in html5. The most universal syntax for the audio player seems to be to separate out the source tag like this:
The “controls” option loads a rather ugly player in every browser except Opera. Most browsers will also support an autoplay option which I find obnoxious and don’t recommend. The preload option (formerly “autobuffer”) is still being adopted by browsers and will be great when it works more universally but I would only use it on the first couple demos.
If you’re on a web-compliant Internet browser (unfortunately that means any popular browser except Internet Explorer), you should be able to see what an Html 5 audio player looks like here:
That’s it as far as coding. Until browsers are updated to incorporate more of the html5 web standards (which are still being vetted), my preference is to keep it simple. And since Internet Explorer isn’t expected to adopt enough of these web standards any time soon, it’s probably a good idea to use both a simply flash audio player and html5, which is what I did here. Of course, I’m still into making things look pretty so I opted not to use the html5 tags on the home page and instead prominently featured my Voiceover Demos link so that it’s part of the first screen content mobile browsers will see. Yep, not the best way to go for a voiceover web site, but probably the way I’ll keep things until I can make html5 audio controls more universally appealing.
Personally, I’m looking forward to more browsers adopting html5 open web standards, especially the audio tags. Embedded audio is just a better, cleaner concept for web development. I also like that visitors can right-click the player and download the files when they need to so you don’t really need a separate link. As for making it look pretty, a little javascripting and use of the new <canvas> tag will ultimately improve the look and functionality of media players on the web.
Hope you like the new site and that you find it much easier to navigate. Let me know!
1. Unfortunately, as of the date of this blog, none of the major marketplaces — Voices.com, Voice123.com, VOPlanet.com or Bodalgo.com — have html5 audio tags so that site visitors can readily play audio on iPhone OS devices, and only Bodalgo and Voice123 currently have download links, which will allow visitors to either play the audio in a separate window or save it locally.
