OUAN405 - Process & Production: Narration Audio (Research)

Along with my background audio which I mentioned in my previous blog post, I contemplated having some form of narration to help the animation feel more relaxed and give a feeling of "story time". I was hoping for some form of Morgan Freeman's voice (which is impossible as I can hardly get in touch with him and ask him for some voice acting!) as I think he has the most beautiful and soothing voice that would work perfectly with my animation if not anything!

I looked into using the "text to speech" feature that most Windows laptops have as this would give a robotic sounding voice and would also make the animation feel a little uncomfortable to watch which would pair well with the style of character. However, after much thought I felt that this was not the best option and I decided to turn to the web for more answers.

I found a brilliant website that is free to use and download created speech off (so long as you don't gain from using the clips commercially) called "Yakitome!" - I imagine this means "Yak it to me" as in "talk to me" which is quite clever! http://www.yakitome.com/tts/text_to_speech# It was there I found a fantastic little text to speech converter that allows you download voices and change the speed of the voice and so forth. This is good research for me as I am able to find a way of acquiring a high-quality voice with an almost synthetic feel (well, it is a fake voice after all!) to it without having to hire a voice actor (which are hard to come by considering I wanted a Morgan Freeman-esque voice!)