Child actors make movies unique. However, filming and recording children can be difficult, especially with regard to speech and dialog for multiple scenes.
Our recent client, Atomic Entertainment, is an Emmy award-winning production company that creates and produces fun, information-driven shows for children and their families. Since the content they produce is children-specific podcasts and videos, they often require recordings of children's voices. After years of experience working with children, Atomic was looking to alleviate the different challenges they were facing while filming and recording children for their programs. That’s when the company turned to Respeecher.
"We’ve been aware of voice cloning for the past few years from press and media articles. We learned about Respeecher in particular while researching solutions for some of our projects", says Jerry Kolber, CEO of Atomic Entertainment. The company found Respeecher's technology to be advanced and able to satisfy the needs of its project.
The Challenge
Sound engineers face a variety of challenges when filming and recording a child’s speech, the most common include:
- As a child grows up, their voice changes. If the situation arises where a re-recording becomes necessary, the young actor's voice may not be the same as when it was recorded.
- Acting skills. Young stars who excel on set often fail to get into character while in the studio.
- Scheduling. Children attend kindergartens or schools and can't be expected to devote the number of hours to a project that an adult can. For Atomic Entertainment, this was the biggest challenge.
"We work with many child actors for whom scheduling and availability can be an issue, particularly with the demanding logistics of our fast-paced publishing schedule," explains Kolber.
The Solution
With Speech-to-speech technology, children don't have to be present in the studio for hours on end. You need only record one hour of a child actor's voice, and an adult actor can then read the required dialog. Using this hour-long recording, any voice can be synthesized into the child's while retaining all the shades of emotion, accent, and speech characteristics.
Instead of a child, a professional dubbing actor can dub different scenes, thereby saving the nerves of parents, children, and the entire production team.
"We appreciate the fact that Respeecher's voice cloning still requires a human actor to record the material, allowing us to transpose voices without reducing the aggregate working hours of human actors," notes Kolber.
The Result
Atomic Entertainment brought in Respeecher as a productive tool for high-volume audio productions. With the help of our platform, the company was able to reduce the complexity of the process of reproducing children’s voices while adding flexibility to the entire operation.
At the same time, Atomic Entertainment focused on preserving the role of voice actors while creating content.
"We are a very human-centric organization that uses technology and AI to support and expand our ability to have the greatest educational impact on the biggest addressable market. It was important to us that any voice cloning technology we adapted would not eliminate or reduce the need for human actors. One concern would be a situation where human actors were no longer necessary — we'd consider that a real loss," explains Kolber.
The Atomic Entertainment team was pleased that their collaboration with Respeecher allowed them to involve human actors and leverage their voices for smoother content production.
The client was also concerned about the security of the source voices, which was addressed immediately as Respeecher sticks to a strict code of ethics regarding the use of individual voices.
Our collaboration with Atomic Entertainment proves that if you need children's voices for your project — it's better to reproduce them using AI. You will save your time and the time of the little actors while eliminating production headaches and hassle.
