First published in Newtype USA magazine

In the Closet

I was shut in a closet the size of a phone booth, with just enough room for my legs. Or rather, there would have been, except for the microphone stand that loomed above me, its chunky business end swelled by a gauze spit-shield.

"This mike is designed for singing," mused the engineer, tapping it thoughtfully.

"Is that good?" I asked.

"Only if you're gonna give us a song," he admitted. "You're supposed to yell at it from six inches away with a band behind you. We're going to have to move it closer."

"How much closer?" I began, as he jabbed me in the eye with it.

This was the fourth anime DVD commentary I'd recorded in as many weeks, but the smallest studio I'd seen so far. In fact, there was so little space, the anime (which, because lawyers like it that way, we're going to call Schoolgirl Milky Crisis) was actually in a different room, playing on a domestic VCR I could only see out the window. So I couldn't hear the dialogue, and had to refer to my notes - although, with 50% of my field of view obscured by the microphone, that made things a little difficult. The whole thing was giving me voice-actor flashbacks. Because I was back in a cupboard.

The great thing about any recorded medium is that you can do stuff out of order. Shoot the end first. Do all the crowd scenes after lunch. If you've got a star, do him first and get him out of there before the groupies arrive (or the cops). On one project, our leading man fled the building just minutes before a whole group of fans arrived to mob him. The director decided to make the most of it, and made them play extras in a crowd scene. If you ever find a copy of Strontium Dog: Fire From Heaven, they play Religious Fanatics #13 through #26.

There are financial benefits, too, to recording things out of order. Actors in the UK, where I've done most of my work, have a fee payable per session. And since there are morning and afternoon sessions, you have to use your time wisely. Book someone to arrive at eleven and leave at two, and you've just eaten up his entire working day - you'll pay for two sessions unless you can do some arm twisting. Book the same guy, for the same amount of time, but have him arrive at nine and leave at twelve, and you've halved your cost. But for some producers, the way to go is cupboard acting.

If you schedule a full day's recording, and bring in six actors, that means you're paying for twelve sessions. You're also paying for the studio and engineer by the hour, and if the clock goes just a single minute past six, everyone except you starts getting overtime. Meanwhile, at any given moment, most of the actors are sitting in the lounge, doing the crossword and drinking your coffee.

One day, someone realised they could get the romantic leads to do all their scenes together, at once, and send them home. They could get their bad guy to make all his speeches in an hour, and then show him the door. Sure, they need a crowd for the big battle scene, but they only need them all for a few minutes. And then there's those handy multitrack recorders, that allow you to make a crowd with just three performers and a sharp stick.

This is cupboard acting, so called because you might as well have cast-members hidden in the closet, and because often there literally will be someone in a separate booth - reading out lines for the actor in the studio to react against. It can soon turn into the audio equivalent of acting in a special effects movie, where you spend three months running around a blue room emoting to a tennis ball on a stick, and have no idea how it's going to look when it's finished.

Some might say (rightly, I think), that performances can suffer as a result. As the voice of an anime bad-guy, I have delivered stirring speeches about my desire to conquer the world, to an empty room, while watching a dumb-show through the soundproof studio glass, as two engineers try to convince the cleaning lady that, yes, they have paid for the studio till six, not five.

Sometime the following morning, the hero and his love-interest, along with their comedy sidekick and the token schoolgirl, would assemble in the same studio and hear my threats in playback. They will gasp and groan and yell at me that I'll never get away with it. But I already had, and so had the producer, who'd shaved thousands off his budget.

It wouldn't kill them to make the booths bigger, though. Or maybe I'm just fatter than I used to be.

Jonathan Clements