This One is SO Not About Astronomy

Being involved in production for videos (as you might see from my Videos and ‘Casts page, or if you’ve seen any of my fulldome video shows), I occasionally get to work with voice-over actors — those folks who you HEAR in games, videos, on TV — in general, narrating things. Theirs is a demanding and interesting job, and for some folks it pays very well. They also have a lot of fun with it. I won’t name-drop here, but wanting a perfect voice for our work has given us the chance to employ some very famous names (and some not-so-famous, but still darned good ones) to narrate our work. (If you want to see who, run on over to Loch Ness Productions and check out our show links.) For me, getting a good voice as a narrator is what makes the astronomy programs I write as approachable as they are. And that’s important when you want to communicate with audiences that often contain people who are afraid of (or even hate) science.

I got intrigued with the mechanics of voice-over acting over the years, mostly because I wanted to make sure my scripts were something that actors could work with easily (or, to put it another way, to make sure they could give a good performance USING the script, rather than “in spite of” it). So, I decided to take a voice-over class from a very classy lady named Wren Ross, who is an actor and voice-over talent you have probably heard in a variety of places. I figured I’d learn to look at a script from the point of view of an actor and that would help me write even better scripts than I already write.

Well, along the way, I got sorta hooked on doing voice-over. And, I started doing a few voice-overs of my own, beginning with making “scratch” tracks for planetarium shows so that we can test out timings, voicing, etc., before we send the script to a “talent” (as they’re often called). The folks at MIT Haystack Observatory liked what they heard and so I began voicing over some podcasts for them. I’m also in a series of short videos that are being shipped with Software Bisque’s Seeker product.

Recently I worked with a German game designer on a game called Dirty Split. (There’s a nice intro video here.) It’s a stylish take-off of 1960s spy movies and more recent films like the Godfather series and “Ocean’s 11” but with none of the overt violence you see in the Godfather.

In Dirty Split (which is a free download) I play two parts: one is a caricature of a haughty society matron; the other is a take-off on a 60s nightclub singer. It was a lot of fun to do and nothing at all like the science material I’ve narrated thus far. It’s a very tame puzzle-solving murder mystery and it has quite a few little “in” jokes in it. One reviewer said he thought it was an excellent game for beginners and he was going to recommend it to his grandchildren! (Although, I wouldn’t give it to very little kids… ) I’m oddly proud of my work in it, mostly because it was so unlike the work I usually do. Now I’m wondering if I could do a science game…