This assignment was to create a voicemail for a movie or tv show character. My first thought was Archer’s famous prank voicemails that he has recorded but I just can’t impersonate his voice. I needed to include my spy character for one of the assignments and decided that if Archer could do it, so could Agent Roberts. There was no direction on whether or not I should be leaving the voicemail, or create the answering machine message so Agent Roberts is leaving a voicemail.

Because Roberts spends so much time out in the field doing secret missions, there is bound to be a time when he needs help and there is no one else on the line. I thought it would be funny if Roberts sounded very nonchalant throughout the whole ordeal, even sounding bored. All of this calm even though you can hear his gunshots, a machine gun, and a helicopter chasing him down in the background.  I think this is representative of most movie secret agents, you see them doing all these really crazy stunts such as fighting on top of a moving train, and it all just seems like it’s a normal everyday encounter.

All sounds were sourced from freesound.org.

When I was flipping through the Assignment bank and came across Movie Voice Machines I got pretty excited. It was 3 stars. It immediately reminded me of a scene in the tv show Futurama. The basic premise was that one character Bender left his roommate Fry on another planet but did not want to get in trouble for it so he used an overly long Voicemail that Fry had recorded and kept remixing it to make it sound like Fry was saying different phrases from behind doors or corners so that everyone is fooled into thinking he is nearby. It is a fun word gag and I’ve always found it interesting. I always thought that was goofy but then again many times voicemails are goofy or super professional. (I still remember the time I was playing around on my family’s voice mail for the house and accidentally made the message the sound of me imitating Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. It took several days of people laughing when they left messages for us to figure out I accidentally did that.)

Heres a clip from that episode to get an idea of what I’m rambling about.

So I already had ideas about figuring out voice mails and answering machines in my head. Although most machines are not as interesting or long winded as the above example. I think of other tv characters who have notably short messages like the NCIS: Los Angeles character Marty Deeks whose voicemail often appears as the short cheery “Gone Surfing.” For my assignment I wanted to create something in between not overly complicated but not so brief either. I wanted a chance to play around with audio outside of my recorded so I decided to go with a character other than my own for the course.

My first idea I started with was creating a voicemail recording for Cassandra Cillian a character on the tv show The Librarians. Only using clips of audio from the show to make her say her own voicemail. This proved even more difficult then I expected it to be. Since it can be hard to use audio from copyrighted shows I worked from the youtube clips mostly released by the network for the shows promotion. (With a few variances to other youtube sources.) Issue two was that it turns out Cassandra speaks the least frequent in all of the clips they provided of the show. She’s in a lot of the show clips but is either silent or using a math term. So I tried to listen closely to each clip to see if any word or piece of a word could be useful at all. Currently now I have a pile of files on my computer named things like “now” or “what’s happening” as I tried to pick up words to string a sentence. I was really not prepared for how long just find her speaking would take and considered switching to another character who would speak more in the clips I was pulling from but I was determined to finish what I started. I went on word hunts through larger clips I could find and got some more words but then I had to issue of what kind of phrase to string together. It was frustrating because at times I could remember she had used a certain word or phrase but I could not find a clip of it to use the audio. In the end I was left with a bunch of audio I had selected out for but that ended up not being useful for what I was doing. Ultimately then I pulled all the clips into Audacity and played around and muddled with them till I got something close to what I wanted. It’s a quick voicemail but it is to the point and the tone I feel matches up with it.

I know, I know… Xena again.  But I’m loving these ideas that integrate television characters with new creativity and media, and thus I tried my hand at this assignment.  I began by brainstorming the sort of messages that might be left for Xena (who is a rather stoic character).  I decided that the most likely voicemail would be a request for help or intelligence information.  I opted to report the movements of one of Xena’s chief adversary’s, Caesar (whose betrayal ultimately led to her initial slip to darkness).  I recorded my piece in audacity, making the tone somewhat jovial and familiar for comedy purposes.  I then searched for a voicemail intro on freesound.org to add to the beginning of the recording.  The result was a fairly authentic sounding and amusing piece.  I have a feeling that Xena would be annoyed with modern phones…

For this assignment we were asked to create a voicemail using a character from a TV show or movie in a way that they would. I’m actually surprised I chose this assignment to do because one thing I hate is to make my voicemail on my phone. I hate hearing myself speak because that voice isn’t the one that I hear when I talk, so it kind of throws me off.
You would think this would be fairly easy because there is a bunch of TV shows and movies out there, but I couldn’t think of any characters that had specific traits that set them apart from any other character. I started thinking of shows such as “Bobs Burgers”, “Family Guy”, “The Simpsons” and basically a lot of shows that have those characters that are so distinct as a person it would be easy to make a voicemail for them. Then I started thinking to myself that I don’t even really watch those shows, so as much as the characters do have very prominent characteristics, I wouldn’t really be able to make a good voicemail to depict what theirs might actually be. I then started to think of things that I am currently watching and the first thing that came to my  head was Game of Thrones. I thought Khalessi would be a good person to do because she has so many different names that she goes by, so I could throw that in there, and she also does many things on the show I could reference.
When making this I created it on SoundCloud and just recorded myself talking. Obviously I had to speak in a British accent to reflect her, but let me tell you, I am definitely not a pro when it comes it impersonating her voice. I tried referencing as many things about her from the show as I could, and I believe I got a good amount of everything in there. I had to re-do this one a few times because I was focusing so hard on the British accent I didn’t know what to say next. Overall, I had fun with this assignment.

Assignment: 3 Stars
http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/movie-voice-machines/

#ds106 #AudioAssignments #AudioAssignments196

For the Movie Voice Machines assignment, I did something a bit different instead. I basically just made my own version of Jesse Pinkman’s answering machine in Breaking Bad. Here is the real one from the show:

Behind the Creation

If it is not obvious already, I am a huge Breaking Bad fan. The show has been over for a couple of years now but they created a spin-off show, Better Call Saul, which is the closest thing to being able to watch the show again. Anyway, the clip above was from either Season 1 or 2 (I can’t remember exactly and I am too lazy to look it up right now). Before the scene, Walt was on the phone with some one and his wife Skyler was suspicious to who he was talking to. After Walt left she hits redial on the phone and gets Jesse Pinkman’s answering machine. It was pretty fun making my own little version of this, and who knows…maybe I will make it my actual voice message.

The Process

To record the audio, I used the Voice Memos app on my iPhone 6. The process of recording the audio was very simple and you can refer to my Sounds Of My Day assignment for the part where I explain the specifics of how to record audio on the Voice Memos app if you would like to know.