Author: Eneasz

Quirrell’s voice was also easy. I knew from the start that I wanted him to sound like Magneto from the 90s X-Men Cartoon. Because he is a bad-ass and extremely competent. Proud, intelligent, ruthless, and powerful. The ideal of the Russian Strong Man Dictator. That was the image I pulled into my mind every time I spoke as him (and still do). Turns out that my memory was wrong – I remembered Magneto as being that awesome, so I remembered his voice as being very deep and resonant. Turns out it isn’t so much. I prefer my mistaken memory, and will continue with deep-Quirrell.

The voice of the Sorting Hat came to me quickly. In years past there was an animated Moses movie, which I didn’t bother to watch, but I managed to hear an interview with someone involved in its production. They were speaking about the difficulty of coming up with a decent Voice Of God during the Burning Bush scene. The “old American patriarch” voice certainly wouldn’t do, because this movie was aimed at the broader public rather than just fundamentalist American Christians. But how do you do God’s voice then? You can’t use a male or a female voice without assigning god a gender, you can’t make him sound like any particular nationality or ethnicity, etc. They tried layering many voices of many actors together for an all-inclusive deity voice, but apparently it ended up sounding awful.

Eventually they settled on simply taking Moses’s own voice and echoing it back to him. Which I personally thought was brilliant, and appropriate on several levels (pssst.. He only exists in your head! ;)) So when Harry is talking to a very powerful entity that borrows his own brain hardware in order to extrapolate what his sorting volition would be… well hell, what it should sound like was easy!

Chapter 9 was originally The Musical Chapter, it was greatly overhauled in the early chapter re-writes. I have to say that I’m happy for the change – as I’ve mentioned previously I’m rather self-conscious about my lack of singing ability and so having an entire musical chapter was a nightmare for me. I believe it came through in the voice work as well, I think I sounded rather awkward. The original is still listed in the Table of Contents if you’d like to hear it, because I don’t think information should be destroyed just because it’s embarrassing in retrospect. But really, it’s not good.

The one saving grace was that The Ghostbusters Theme was chosen – it’s already fairly ridiculous. On a technical level it was a perfect choice as well. The 80s synthesizer sound made it ideal for vamping (since it was far too short in its original state to fill all the time needed for narration). With large chunks that were identical in sound it was easy enough to cut & splice that even a noob with less than 80 hours of sound editing experience could make it loop endlessly at several points. It helped that I was talking over the music too, which made disguising the cuts easier. It was probably the best possible song to work with. Thank goodness for small mercies.