Dubbing Anthony Hopkins voice?

When they finish shooting a movie they move into the stage of post-production – 'post'.

One of the things they do in post is to sort the sound out and the sound editor is – or was – one of the most thankless of jobs ion the film industry. They have to strip the sound down so that there is only dialogue and then add sound effects: cars going passed, a radio, dogs barking etc and if some dialogue hasn't been recorded properly they sync the sound afterwards and this is called post syncing; if they didn't do this the background sound would jump about all over the place.

When I say it used to be a thankless job I mean it's not so bad now when they can edit with the aid of a computer as opposed to years ago when they actually had to cut the film and hang tiny bits of it all over the editing room and the bits of sound they cut out would sometimes be as little as an inch long and they had to keep those little pieces somewhere safe.

Well yesterday I got a call from my agent to go and do Anthony Hopkins's voice this morning; when I had gone to these people before it was usually to actually do the job so last night I looked on YouTube for Anthony Hopkins bits and found a few movies and a few interviews.

I listened to the clips and practised it till I got it right – or as close as I could get it; he has a kind of chest voice and sometimes sounds a bit hoarse; he also has a Welsh accent; not very pronounced – shall we say well spoken educated Welsh. For example the Welsh who are not that posh would pronounce 'ear' as 'year' and 'here' as 'year' too and they would say that as an Englishman with a posh accent would say it; something like 'yer' rhyming with purr; clear?? Never mind!

So with all this on board I set out to the recording studio this morning on Hollywood Boulevard – just a walk from where I live.

When I got there the first person I saw was someone called Julian Holloway who was fairly well known in Britain and the son of Stanley Holloway of My Fair Lady fame.

We were given a piece of paper with some dialogue on; so it was an audition! Pretty soon another guy came in who was Irish; I'm Irish too but you wouldn't think it to hear me.

Presently the ADR editor came and she asked us into her office; when we got there she told us that we weren't doing an Anthony Hopkins voice match at all; it was the opening narration to a movie called Season of the Witch starring Nicolas Cage and they wanted an Anthony Hopkins 'type' of voice. The character we were to play was one of the actors in the movie when he grows old and she played us his voice and showed us the opening of the movie. Someone said he sounded Irish then someone else said 'well Tony Hopkins is Welsh.' “Yes” she said “but we want his kind of gravitas.

With that two of us left the room and the first fella had a go at it – Julian Holloway; I was called in second and read it straight – the way I speak - and she asked me to put a little bit of an Irish influence to it and the third time I did it I did a little more.

I left her with five takes to choose from and went about my way ready to do an Anthony Hopkins voice if anybody else should ask.

By the way ADR means Additional Dialogue Recording – watch this space!!!