“Can you ‘AB’ that?”
“Give us an ‘ABC’ on line 7.”
Would you know what to do if you were asked this in a recording session?
When they request you “ABC” a line, what they want is for you to say the same line two or three different ways. The voice director or recording engineer will often ask for an “AB” in the following situations:
1. The voice actor has read the line already and they’re not quite nailing the delivery. Varying the inflection or emotion a bit on each take can help an actor get unstuck from a certain read that’s not working.
2. A script may be full of dialog (two or more people in conversation with each other), but each actor is being recorded separately. In this situation, both the director and the actor have to imagine how the other performer(s) might deliver their lines. When they compile all the voice tracks together, it needs to sound like all the characters are in the same scene, listening and responding to each other appropriately. This can be very difficult when the actors aren’t recording together. Yet the majority of projects nowadays are recorded this way! By giving a variety of reads on a line,
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