On Sunday, I hosted a voice artist session for the characters of my webshow. It went freaking great.

I’ll admit that the one thing that really made me decide on pursuing this cartoon endeavor was the discovery of my sound guy/editor. Cartoons are extremely sound-and-dialogue dependent, much more than live action, because at the very least you can record the raw sound live. In animation, every noise and cue and beat has to be created, either from scratch or a in-depth sound library. It has to be mixed well and smoothed out and timed and so many other different elements that, unless I paid someone to do it, would be impossible on my end.

My sound guy worked in animation and now does video editing for a major video game company. He LOVES to edit sound, so when I so humbly asked him to assist with the project, he said yes. He joined me on the voice artist session and provided an amazing set of insights to my own script! Even though the session lasted about 5 hours, it was very productive, and we managed to keep the energy going until the very end. I’m really proud, and frankly surprised, that the entire session went off without a hitch.

The next step is meeting with my actual animator, who at this point agreed to be the art director as well, to discuss the overall “look” of the show – color palette (the animation equivalent of cinematography), banner/logo designs, perspectives, themes, fonts, and all that good stuff. He’s also a good friend, and I’m hoping that should go well, too.

The beauty of all this is the voice over session took place entirely on the web. My sound guy, the voice actors, and I met on Skype. Each VO actor had recorded their voices on Audacity, a freeware voice recording program. I gave them FTP access to some webspace to upload the large audio files for me and my sound guy to access. All these things were free, save for the 10 bucks a year for webspace anyway. In this day and age, there’s so much people can truly do for cheap and free, but the really great thing is that these tasks can be done across the nation; hell, even around the world. I’m in NY; my sound guy is in California. My VO actors were in Tennessee, Ohio, and Georgia.

Sure, you hear this all the time, but how often have you really “applied” this idea, beyond cell phone chatting and instant messaging? How often do people really get work done using the full range of the internet and all it’s capabilities beyond Facebook and, let’s say, Linkedin? The key is like talking to a girl. You just have to ask.