Hugh Edwards is a big fish in the world of voiceover. Having cast hundreds of top game titles, and beings an Emmy judge, AND being the CEO of the world largest Voiceover career platform – Gravy for the Brain – makes him the go to for any current voiceover knowledge. In this interview originally recorded at Christmas 2022, Hugh and Toby Discuss the following:
- Hugh’s history in Acting
- When is it ok to do voiceover for free?
- How did you get into the world of voiceover?
- Career path is an evolution, rather than an absolute
- What are some of the biggest titles you’ve worked on?
- What a VO needs to do to get into voicing videogame characters
- Why is voiceover in games not very well paid?
- You’ve been involved in directing Text-to-Speech (TTS) since the beginning, tell us about this journey
- What are some of the challenges around AI / TTS voice
- Diversity within voice casting for games
- What’s some advice for people auditioning for TTS work?
- Where did the name Gravy for the Brain come from?
- What has been the thing you’ve most enjoyed about 2022?
- Is it better to be a voice artist today or 20 years ago?
- What’s planned for Xmas?
TRANSCRIPT:
Toby Ricketts
Welcome to vo live brought to you by gravy for the brain Oceania today, we’ve got a special guest here. Well, they’re always special guests on and let’s be honest. It’s we as you know, we have like the movers and shakers of the voice world, people are big in the world of voiceover. And last year, I had a wonderful Peter Dixon on for a fireside chat. And I thought, well, it’s only right really to to invite his co conspirator on I’m Hugh Edwards, who is of course CEO of gravy for the brain worldwide. welcome you.
Hugh Edwards
All right. Thank you for just placing me in rank a year behind Peter.
Toby Ricketts
I love Exactly. Yeah, there you go.
Hugh Edwards
I know. I know where I’m where I’m supposed to be place, Toby.
Toby Ricketts
It’s fine. Exactly. And actually, I nearly forgot, but I didn’t quite that. I drank whiskey on that on that show. So I can I can toast you and get slightly drunker as the interview goes on, as we did last year, but there’s probably not any whiskey in the in the office where you are. It’s. So if you were drinking, it would probably be a problem. But
Hugh Edwards
t’s 9am I’ve got I’ve got myself a nice coffee, and hello to all of the audience. Thanks for joining us.
Toby Ricketts
Cool. So like lots of ground to cover today in terms of like we want to find out about Hugh Edwards where you’ve come from all about your kind of how you found the voiceover world and sort of what you’ve what you’ve learned from it and what you’ve done within it. Covering because you like from the the bit of IMDb stalking that I’ve been doing it introduce you as an actor, producer and voice director and casting director and at the act a bit surprised me Have you acted?
Hugh Edwards
I have actored
Toby Ricketts
What in?
Hugh Edwards
Well, so let me see. I’ve done seven films, I think. And I’ve been in probably a couple of 100 computer games. But that was mainly because with the computer games, I ended up there was always a few lines that the games company missed. And so rather than just go and hire someone for it, it’s like fine, I’ll just go and do it. And then they’ve got you know, a little bit more and more. But I always tended to try and not cast myself because a tiny bit unethical, isn’t it? A little bit? Yeah, a little bit. But it was just when there was when there were things that needed filling. So I just run in and do them.
So lots and lots of little tiny snippets of games. And yeah, a few films, mainly budget on actual speaking parts. I’ve been killed a lot of ways. I’ve been, I’ve been mauled to death. I have been eaten by a werewolf, zombie or gets ripped out by zombies. I’ve been chained sawed in half. That was a really good onscreen effect, actually. Yeah. And I was just sort of like hanging there. With no torso. It’s quite funny. I would imagine a lot of my enemies like to watching that.
Toby Ricketts
Gosh, this is a site that I completely didn’t know it existed so that the challenge for everyone is to go and find these independent zombie films that that start you out. It’s being being cut up. So yeah, answers on a postcard, please.
Hugh Edwards
Well, funnily enough, the very first film that I ever did, was a film called Little Big Men. And it was a film it’s a kid’s film. And the idea was, you had these four gangsters, adult gangsters and they stole this massive diamond. And they got caught by the karma police and shrunk into kids. And the kids that the trick was with the shows that the kids retained their adult voices. So it was like one massive ADR gig. And I was one of the characters in that. And I was kind of producing that as well, at the end of it. I mean, talk about low budget, this was really low budget. And at the end of it, we’ve completely run out of money. We’ve spent it all on catering, I think, and and I called up my friend, Neil Gardner, who’s an audio producer in the UK.
And I said, Neil, we need a voiceover and he said, Well, there’s always Dickon, and he’ll sort of say anything. So I call that this chap who I didn’t know called Peter Dickon. And this was in the middle of his X Factor career like 2004. I think it was 2005. And I mean, Peter was big news. You know, he was a household name here. And he said, Yes, I’d love to do it. I said, there’s no money. And he said, no worries. And so he just came down. In fact, he actually paid to do it because he paid his own petrol down to the studio. So he came was in this little tiny thing. And then I think a month later, I was doing a game for National Geographic. And so I gave the part to Peter as a sort of, by way of thanks, you know, and, you know, a couple of liquid lunches after that, and that’s how we became friends.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah, gosh, how interesting and thus GFTB was was born but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. So it’s kind of, I guess one of those lessons in voiceover that like we always bang on about charge what you’re worth, you know, don’t do good. Do the race for them. Um, but like, there are occasions when and sometimes it does pay off, like, if you were, if you were doing a favor for someone, or you can see it’s going to go somewhere, you know, like he kind of invested in that in that future. And I mean, if he hadn’t done of that, then, you know, we wouldn’t be talking probably,
Hugh Edwards
That’s true. There’s always like a little tiny thing in the corner, that gives you the worry if they say it’s for free, but you’ll get great exposure, warning signs, because they’re just trying to get you for free, right. But there are lots of occasions, I mean, you know, community radio is a very soul fulfilling type of thing. And in general, that’s for free. But you get to meet nice people, and you get to have fun with it and, and help out, you know, people either in the community or local hospital, radio, or those sorts of things. charity works very, very good.
Not only does it get you through the pearly gates, but it also helps you where helps the charity because you know, they need charitable donations, and your service is one of them. But also, you’ll get invited to parties, by the charity for some launch thing or whatever. And you’ll be sitting next to a CEO of some company that you just couldn’t have sat next to otherwise, because you were involved in the project as well. And they’re sponsoring it or whatever it is. These things, I think, are good things to do. I do see an awful I mean, the Facebook groups of this world are simultaneously brilliant and full of horror. Because you see an awful lot of people saying Don’t you dare not charge for this you charge your worth and all this kind of stuff.
But yeah, I mean, sometimes it works out and sometimes if you want to do a project because it’s fun, go do it.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah, it’s a balance isn’t it to total balance because like cam like you say, like I will donate my time the same way I donate my money to to do certain projects like that and like you say it’s very fulfilling and you never know what it’s going to lead to often doesn’t lead to where charity dinners for me because it’s the airfares to get there a bit steep.
Hugh Edwards
Also, I mean, you you live further out than Crocodile Dundee went walkabout. Right? You’re right in the middle of nowhere. So.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah, exactly. So where did it all start the voice thing? Have you always been interested in things like voice? Have you got any formal training? Like what was the genesis of your entry into the into the voice and entertainment world?
Hugh Edwards
Well, so I had a kind of acting bent as a kid. I was raised by “am dram” parents. I was Tiny Tim many a year in the Christmas carol on stage and things like that. And I just loved it when I was a kid. And I was always in theaters, with my parents. And in fact, the first time I ever got drunk was an after show party for one of theirs. But yeah, so I always had that in my youth. And I kind of kept that through, through my teens, and then into my 20s and things like that. But I wanted to be a rock star. That’s what I wanted to do. And I was I was a drummer. So went to university hours, never not a drummer. And I went to university, and I wanted to move to London and pursue my fame and fortune. And my mother, quite rightly said, no, no, no, you got to get a real job. Otherwise, you’re gonna end up on the streets.
So I ended up working in investment banking. For nine years, I worked for Credit Suisse First Boston, and then Merrill Lynch. And I ended up being a relatively successful IT project manager there. And I was looking after really big projects. Big team, I think 60 was the last team size I had for this big project I was doing. But it was it was not what I wanted to do. And it was very sapping of all life. And the last four years I worked there, I shouldn’t have, but they had these things. These, we used to call them the golden handcuffs in the city, where every Christmas, they’d give you a 15,000 pound bonus. And then in June, they’d give you a 10% pay rise, and you could never leave because you’re always waiting for the next thing.
Anyway, I was seeing a young lady at the time. And she said, “Look, I’m out of here, I’m gonna go around the world for a year you can come or you can stay. But if you’d stay, I guess we’re done”. And I thought, You know what, this is like a perfect opportunity. So I went around the world with her. Before I did, though, I ended up speaking to Electronic Arts about some music because I’ve been doing music all the way through, hence the Rockstar dreams. And I went to bid for the second Harry Potter games do the composition for it. And we ended up not getting it. It’s a bit of a convoluted story, which I won’t go too much into. But we got down to the last two. And when we got down to the last two that we were talking about money and they said to me, what’s your what’s your what can you do this an hour’s worth
of music for and having negotiated loads of big contracts at Merrill Lynch which gave me great stead, I suppose for my life, said well, what’s your budget. And they said, Well, we couldn’t do it for anything less than 30,000. And I was like, Oh my God, there’s a living to be made here. So whilst going around the world, me and my best friend Jeremy, we started a company. And as soon as I got back after the travel, we started up and originally we were going to be doing music. This is 2001 I think it was. And we did so much music, we got a great contract for ITV, which is a big TV station here in the UK. And in a year, we did something like 250 commercials. It was it was very, very lucky, very fortunate. But it completely set us up. And then one day, this games company that we were composing for, for Steve Davis’
World Championship, snooker said to us, you do dialogue, right. And we went, Yeah, sure, we do. Yeah. And having had a bit of training, and then a bit of directing of local stuff. And this, that and the other. We got Steve Davis in and we directed him and absolutely loved it. At the same time as the dialogue career 2000 to 2003 started to take off, I was falling out of love with music, it became like paint by numbers. Because one games company would say, Okay, we want some John Williams Star Wars II type stuff. Great. We’d go and do that. And the next one would be like, we want the Bourne Identity big drums Bum Bum bum. Great would do that. And the next one would be rafter sort of John Williams, like Star Wars type thing. Right? Right. Okay.
And the next one would be like, we definitely want Bourne Identity as close as you can get. Okay, and it just, it just got really tiresome. But the dialogue was was allowing us to, to be creative and work with actors and, and bring life to things that at the time were being done. Not so well. You know, the dialogue in games used to be a bit of a joke. In the old days, it wasn’t particularly good. Not not all, in all cases, of course, there were some really good things, but in the main, it wasn’t brilliant. And so it just kind of took off. And I just did game after game after game and really loved it. And that was the kind of start of it. About getting into dialogue. Meeting Peter, as I said, 2014 and five. Then we just became friends for a while we set up another company called My Ruddy Voice, which was kind of one of the world’s first
TTS models, I suppose. Because it was concatenating phrases. Yeah, it would be like Toby, happy birthday. And you could sort of download that, but it would calm things on the fly. Right? And we phrases, right? It was Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was like more like the train station version TTS, rather than what we see now. But yeah, so we did that. And, and it was it was a meteoric success until the iPhone came out. And then everyone realized that they didn’t want ringtones or downloadable content for phones anymore, and it literally fell off a cliff. But by that point, we were we were getting into the training side.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah. Gosh, how interesting. So, so yeah, it’s quite a sort of long weaving path. And it’s explained so much, so much that I didn’t know about you, especially the investment banking part, with the asking, asking about the budget, and all that sort of stuff. It’s so interesting that like, there are all these skills that you learn on your journey, be it short or long that you kind of that you can apply in future to future future skills, you know, especially like things like that you’ll learn about always ask about the price first. Because if you go in and say 100 quid, and they say, Oh, we were actually thinking 50,000, but no, your sounds better.
Hugh Edwards
Well, or even worse, this guy can’t be any good. If he’s only charging 100 quid because all the other quotes, we’ve got three or 4000
Toby Ricketts
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally. That’s what ‘d say..
Hugh Edwards
You know, though, I, I say to, I mean, I’ve got children. And one of the things that, in hindsight, always perplexed me was why careers advisors at school never told you that, that your career path is an evolution. You know, it’s very, very rare that you set out to be a postman, and you’re always going to be a postman. You know what I mean? It’s just, your life doesn’t go like that. It meanders. And I really wish that they would tell children that when they’re teens, because the pressure of having to having to just be an architect, ya know, that that’s what you’re gonna do. It must be really difficult.
Toby Ricketts
And I think studies say these days that people have five or six careers, if not more, right. So that was from a few years ago. So I mean, they’re, you know, this this thing at the moment that employers are facing about how millennials just like, if they’re not having a job, they’ll just leave it and just like have, you know, 10 jobs in a year? Because there’s obviously more jobs, which is yeah, like you say, so. That’s how interesting that’s, that’s really interesting. And you’ve worked with some, some fairly big clients like after that in terms of like getting into the casting for gaming.
After that point, like, you know, you’ve you’ve you’ve I was looking at your credits here. I mean, there’s lots of really big stuff that Harry Potter name comes up quite a bit. What are some of the biggest jobs that you’ve worked on as a as a games director or casting and then directing for gaming?
Hugh Edwards
Well, I mean, the biggest name one is Harry Potter. Probably because that’s one of the biggest name productions in the whole world, right? I got Harry Potter and my friend got Game of Thrones, you know, you win some you lose some. But that one I mean, I was by no means the biggest dialogue producer in the UK at the time. High score, which is one of my other companies that does all the production High Score Productions, which I wish I in hindsight again had not named it that because whenever I call anyone out there like high school productions, what’s that?
Toby Ricketts
But anyway, it’s clear, though, it’s very clear, but
Hugh Edwards
well, because it was originally meant to be for music, right? So yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, I mean, we weren’t the biggest. But we, we had a reputation for being very diligent, and always been very responsive. And we got the Harry Potter gig on recommendation, because the producer at the time was saying, okay, yeah, you can go with these guys, but you really gonna get looked after if you go with these guys and that’s what they wanted. So, clients, so we did that. Yeah. And it was a really interesting game to work on. Because it’s one of the even though it’s one of the biggest ones I’ve done. It’s one of the few that was voice matching. And so it was acting with invoice matching for the majority of it.
The other side of it was creating characters that weren’t in the films or the books, and trying to create good characters that sounded like they were from the world, which was, which is really good fun. But I’ve done. I mean, you’ve got to be a real gamer to know some of the biggest stuff I’ve worked on. Fallout 3 is a pretty big name and the gaming Fallout 3, Elder Scrolls Oblivion. Yeah. Lots of racing titles like Moto GP, Beijing Olympics, things like that. And now,
Toby Ricketts
here’s the game boards challenge.
Hugh Edwards
And there’s another one cheggers, cheggers party quiz, which was a funny one, you’d have to know who cheggers is to get why that’s funny. But he was a real character. Yeah, so I mean, I don’t know what the final score is. It’s over 300, something like that projects I’ve done of those. Not all of them are on IMDb. I have to say there’s a lot more on the high score credits list. Yeah. And so I mean, most of the games that we did get some big ones like that, of course, but a lot of the games were smaller as well. And there’s nothing wrong with small games. Nowadays, the I don’t do all that many games. Now. I mainly do games that I still got contacts with where they still want me to go and do things for them. Because nowadays, I work mainly in the film sector.
And that’s, that’s the area that I that I’ve kind of evolved into a little bit. But yeah, I mean, games are now kind of iterative. I mean, I do a lot of MMOs, which I’ve got one that I’ve been working on since 2017. And it’s just so successful every other month, they release a new DLC or a new mission or something like that. And then that’s another, you know, 15 days of dialogue. It’s the game that keeps on giving.
Toby Ricketts
So lots of acronyms character in MMOs is massively multiplayer online.
Hugh Edwards
Yes. Yeah. The big online games that everyone joins and all plays together. Yeah. Right as DLC downloadable content.
Toby Ricketts
expansion packs effectively, right?
Hugh Edwards
Yeah, but the but nowadays there. You don’t have to go and buy the CD for it.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah, absolutely. And while we’re on games, because like, I had a question that I want to ask about, like the evolution of games, because I am, I actually spent a recent time with, with my buddy, we agreed to set aside a day and just immerse ourselves in games because he hadn’t gotten to VR. And I’ve had, I’ve gotten the VR rig and definitely gotten to VR.
And I hadn’t got into any PlayStation titles or anything like that. And he was like, you have to come and like play like The Last of Us or something. Just totally get it. And yeah, hi, was my favorite game of all time. Totally. And it’s, I mean, it’s it is one of those seminal games that people just hold up as, like, this is the way it’s meant to be done. And I played The Last of Us 2.
Hugh Edwards
And I was just really spoilers because it’s in cellophane for me. Oh,
Toby Ricketts
nice. Yeah. Fantastic. I mean, I was amazed at how much like movies games are. Now, basically, there’s this crossover, where you’re actually watching the movie, but you get to, like, sometimes you’re on rails, sometimes you’ve got a bit more agency about what’s going on in the world. But it does feel like a movie. It’s just being rendered in real time. With
Hugh Edwards
Yeah, I mean, The Last of Us. My when I was with my ex partner, we played The Last of Us together. And within the first 15 minutes, she was crying. Yeah, I mean, that’s the emotional hook that that game has. Yeah, it’s really quite special. But I mean, there are so many games, like the modern combats. One more Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Yeah. My friend Kirsty Gilmore has just worked on that. She has done very well with it. And yeah, in fact, we’ve I think we’ve just booked her for one Voice UK for this year. Oh, fantastic. Come and talk about games and experiences in that because she’s doing really, really well.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah. Yeah, actually. And on that note, I’ve, because again, I’ve been kind of researching because I’m fascinated by the game genre, because I’ve never really, I’ve worked in it a little bit as a full service. And I’d like to do it more, which involves research and you got to find out what kind of games there are, what kind of kind. And a YouTube is such a fantastic resource because it lets you you don’t have to actually go out, buy a console, buy the game, and then spend 16 hours playing the game, you can literally just watch someone else play it. And it’s just about as enjoyable if not more enjoyable, because you’ve got all this amazing.
Hugh Edwards
I would disagree with you a little bit. But yeah, I mean, finally, what you’re about to say is the is the opening to our gaming courses. I’m gonna start researching the watch the playthroughs
Toby Ricketts
Yeah, obviously. And like I kind of I just wanted to take a look because it was actually it was actually because Kirstie posted about this and said, I’ve just been involved with this project. And I was like, I’ve heard about this, I want to go see what it is I started watching, I think the previous one call of duty 2 Modern Warfare yet or that is that the current one I
Hugh Edwards
Black Ops or something or other.
Toby Ricketts
But um, and I just couldn’t stop watching. It was like addictive, like because they got the scene length just right. And they got all of the clever hooks and the action beats just at the right point and like so the choreographed so much like an action movie that it’s it’s crazy. And the storylines are so good. And I’m fascinated just how much like movies there. I mean, gaming, outpaces movie in terms of revenue hugely now doesn’t overtook long it does now.
Hugh Edwards
Yeah. Especially since on demand TV has become so popular movies have gone down as well. So the relative balance within games has gone up. But it massively changed when they started paying attention to the storylines and the story arcs and actually hiring proper writers in to do these games. I
Toby Ricketts
suppose there was always Yeah, this wasn’t Yeah, yeah.
Hugh Edwards
Because yeah, I mean, in the very early days, sometimes you had like the art director, or whoever writing the script, you know, and you could, you could do your best. But at the end of the day, the story arc was what it was, you know, it’s been an it’s been an evolution of all sides of the, if the game development world, it really has, from the education all the way up to the top of people understanding that they need to put more investment into to the production of these and that it does matter that you have a story writer there from the beginning,
and that the scene directors are there from the beginning, and the voice directors there from the beginning and stuff. So yeah, the whole thing has evolved hugely. Ironically, my favorite games that I’m playing at the moment, are racing games, which don’t have much dialogue in, no. Wonder if that says something about me.
Toby Ricketts
And just quickly on the VR thing, I know you’re on it, because I’ve seen because we’re friends on Facebook, and I’ve got an Oculus quest, to it shows me that you like you’re not online, which means you are part of the system that you’re not online at the time. But I’ve been playing Half Life, Alyx, which is like incredible video game and has some pretty good voice acting, too. But a great storyline as well. But amazing world building going on. The only problem was sorry, you go, I
Hugh Edwards
was just gonna say this is one of the downsides to the walkthroughs is that there is something addictive. If you haven’t played games, there’s something addictive about playing them getting killed, getting up and getting getting past that person. And then especially if you’ve got a headset on, it’s a different experience than watching it on YouTube altogether. Yeah, there’s actually
Toby Ricketts
no way to talk about or experience what VR is like without actually doing it yourself as my experience. Yeah,
Hugh Edwards
it’s like diving. You have to do it, to understand it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Toby Ricketts
totally. So we’re gaming and voiceover overlaps, which is, you know, quite a lot of it because it’s, it’s everything else, pretty much as you know, it’s stories written and everything’s generated in the computer. And then the soundtrack and the voiceover obviously have to be made by real people. And, like, I’ve been really surprised in getting into the gaming stuff that gaming, voice work isn’t better paid, because it’s pretty quick requires incredible talent, and commitment. So what do you have to say about like, relative rates for things like gaming, because I mean, even the sag, you know, rates in the states are much less than the commercial rates, and even the corporate rates, industrial rates. So how do you explain the fact that there’s some a bit of difference?
Hugh Edwards
Well, firstly, there is a historical precedent set for rates in gaming. And, like most industry, I mean, at the moment, we’re trying to argue the ILR rates in the UK which are historically set incredibly low, just because of the way that they evolved in the in the beginning, which doesn’t apply to now. That’s That’s one reason. And so budgets are built based on those kind of historical precedence. The second reason is that there is a just like films. You know, Gary Oldman is going to get 20 million, and the guy who comes on for the one scene with one line, who’s spent just as many, just as much money in acting training or whatever, is not going to get 20 million, you know, he’s going to be on a, on a very, very different pay scale.
So, you know, if you go and try and book Troy Baker, you’re gonna pay an awful lot more than if you book a relative unknown from an agency, it’s the way it is, it’s supply and demand. So games are also based on that, because they want certain style or some do. I mean, some, some games just will have unknowns in them. But very often, I mean, I did a game with Stephen Fry, for example. And I mean, I won’t tell you what his budget was. But it was a large part of the dialogue of what the boss constituent part of the dialogue, budget, and that was done with budget from the marketing side, because they know they can market the game, because it’s got Stephen Fry in it. So it’s a combination of all of those things. And then at the same time, you also have to understand that a lot of games companies are successful.
And, you know, if you look at Naughty Dog or Rockstar, you know that they’re big, big, successful companies. But you look at someone like Rovio, who did Angry Birds, who are, you know, a massively successful when Angry Birds was successful, it was their 52nd game and the 51 before it lost money, you know, and these guys were mortgaging second, mortgaging their houses to be able to do that. So it’s not always the case. I mean, if you go down to the the develop conference in Brighton, or the business side of E3, or, or game connection in Paris, or any of these industry conferences that happen, you’ll find the big cheese’s in one corner on a small table, and then the rest of the conference full of indie developers all doing games.
And they’re all set the same kind of way. So yeah, the bigger games tend to have slightly bigger budgets, and you can negotiate your way up there, the smaller games, in general don’t have that much budget to actually play with in the first place.
Toby Ricketts
There’s a bit of a pumped sort of a risk from their perspective.
Hugh Edwards
Right, Yeah. And this is also a commercial enterprise. You know, this isn’t the BBC, these are solo business people, you know, sometimes solo, sometimes two or three of them, raising finance, friends and family, you know, and they’re the ones taking all the risk, you get to go in and do your job and then walk away. So whilst they absolutely understand that there is a question mark, sometimes over the rates on gaming, I think it’s also fair to say that games are absolutely symbiotic. You know, if the art doesn’t work, it’s going to be crap, even if the dialogue is great. If the dialogue is crap, it’s going to be a rubbish game, if the physics engine doesn’t work properly, all of these things combined, and everyone has paid a wage to go and do what they do to make the end product.
So just because the person is an actor, does not mean that their input is better than the guy who wrote the physics engine. You know, and I think that’s the one thing that, that the world didn’t really get when sag came about that the games company said, I’m sorry, this is just a totally collaborative process. And, you know, if we put you as an actor on royalty, we would have to put the physics engine guy on royalty, because they’re just as important. So it’s not the same thing, as as films and TV. I don’t know if that answers your question, there’s probably just as many arguments against that, as there are, so it’s
Toby Ricketts
very useful to to always look behind them figure out, you know, why it is the case. And as you say, it does make make a lot of sense. That, that, that it’s arrived at that, you know, and and different sort of genres seem to have different parts to a rate. And, you know, usually commercial, the reason that the top rates and commercial are so big is because those companies will leverage it voiceover and make millions off it, like off that one ad, it has to be right, and you have to hit like, you know, have have that that magic that they’re looking for, which is,
Hugh Edwards
you know, I mean, I’m not going to name the name of the person. But for those of you guys who are watching this who don’t know, the reason that Toby and I know each other is because Toby cleaned up at the One Voice Awards. I think it was 2018 and 2019. And we just said, right, well, this is the guy we’ve got to make work for us in Oceania. And so we’ve kind of tied you down to that which has been which has been lovely and a pleasure. But but but you have a very specific skill when it comes to doing commercials. And that’s what people pay for, you know That’s why you get those ads for BMW and whatever. And I remember hiring you to go and help coach a friend of mine who was auditioning for one of those types of things to say, look, if you want to do it, here’s the guy who’s going to show you how to do it,
because it’s, you know, he’s outstanding at it. So those commercial things, you really do get what you pay for. Sometimes, again, you they pay for big names. Others they don’t. I mean, I’ve always had a bit of a bugbear that they would that things like Kung Fu Panda out of Pixar, or Disney or wherever they came from. We’re always marketed on the fact that Jack Black was the voice when actual fact if you go back just a few just a decade and have a look at what Disney were doing.
The names in things like Aladdin were all unknown, but they were way better voice actors, you know, way better voice actors. And then and then you just got this thing where it’s just like, Okay, this stars in this one. You know, whoever it is Gwyneth Paltrow is blah blah, blah with a Pixar Animation designed around her. Great, it sounds a bit but it’s not particularly brilliant voice acting.
Toby Ricketts
They’ve done a little bit of original stuff recently, like Moana and stuff.n
Hugh Edwards
It’s getting better I must say
Toby Ricketts
Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that’s getting more sort of diversified. Especially which is which is good. Cool. So well, games and and and fees and everything. Thanks for going down that that little path with me, um, rabbit hole, that rabbit hole? Absolutely. So and one of the other big, big things you’re you’re known for. And one of the big things on your kind of on your who you’ve worked for sheet is a big it’s a big question mark around 2014 and a massive client who you’re under NDA for, for helping them develop TTS. Are you still under NDA for that?
Hugh Edwards
Yeah. And, and I was speaking to someone on a webinar live the other day, who used to work for that company just I said, I can’t talk to and he said, Oh, wasn’t it bla bla bla. And I was like,
Toby Ricketts
so it’s a big company.
Hugh Edwards
It’s a big, one of the top five big companies in the world. 2012 was the fiirst one.
Toby Ricketts
So you were bought in this, this thing that’s called TTS, which has suddenly kind of enveloped us and like, was totally like, it’s amazing to go back to 2012. In places like that. And thinking like that, this was like, you know, your computer speaking to you. And speaking in a very natural and believable way, was, you know, when when we thought of computer generated voices, we thought of Stephen Hawking. And it was very clear that it was being made up by a computer. But, you know, fast forward to now. And it’s like part of that tapestry of our lives like that our computers talk to us all the time about everything at the stuff, the Zoom call, the lady informed us that this has been recorded.
Hugh Edwards
Although that was playback to be fair,
Toby Ricketts
well, that’s true. That is just bad speech synthesis as well. So take us back to that beginning of TTS and and how you were you got involved in this, this large project,
Hugh Edwards
which segues quite nicely on to it for gaming. The very nearly said the company that the the company in question have to be careful. They clocked on to the fact really early, that they couldn’t go to just normal voice agents and normal casting directors, especially people who did like commercials or TV, because they had no experience directing long form whatsoever. The only sector that had experience casting, going through huge voice casting things, and then doing long form direction weeks and weeks at a time with a game people. So although I’m not supposed to know, I happen to know that three of us who worked for this company, three separate companies were all in the game dev world.
And so we we were the experts, by de facto by default, you know, because we were the ones doing that kind of work. Although it was quite new for us at the time. So we would we just went through massive casting there. And when I say big, I mean, you know, we’re talking a couple of 1000 people down to one voice. And it wasn’t in those days, there weren’t the big pay to plays where you’d say, okay, 1000 voices, please. And they’d go short, Bing, or click here they are, you know, it just didn’t work like that. We were having to go around all of the agents, we were having to be very creative, where we found people. Especially, I mean, I’ve done 40 I think it’s 48 for them 48
Different TTS models now. And especially the majority of those were not English, UK. So you know, I’ve been I’ve traveled very well from that job, but going to places like, you know, Russia and Slovenia, and Thailand and I can’t even remember the ones I’ve done for them. I’m trying to find that many people in those territories where they don’t have voice agents, you know, was a really difficult casting gig. But you know, we had experience doing it. So, we were creative, and we and we found the right people. And so I’m not entirely sure what I can. And I got to be a little bit careful. But 2012 was the first one we did. And in those days, it was concatenative. So, as we were talking about
earlier on, when you mentioned phonemes, the analogy for people who are watching is, as we were saying, you know, Toby, one phrase, happy birthday, second phrase, yet, whatever. So that’s concatenating, two phrases stick gluing them together. And what the first evolutions of this would do is they would chop them into phonemes, which are the very smallest parts of dialogue. In actual fact, they were, if you want to be technical about it, they were Demi phonemes, because it crossed the middle of a phoneme to the next one, because it made them easier to glue. But because of that, we would have to record massive amounts, massive amounts of dialogue.
So the first one I ever did was was six months recording. And it was five days a week, four hours a day for six months.
Toby Ricketts
Wow, no stop. And including just covering the phonemes. Like was this actually saving into like wav files, and then like uploading,
Hugh Edwards
so we created wav files, they built the tech to go and do all the chopping, and whatever. But it was it was very, very specific. And and this is why at the time, you had to say everything in the exact same prosody pattern, because you stood much more of a chance of of lining everything up and making it not sound buggy. The bugs are the bits that sound like where you get a little jump between a pitch shift. And it sounds a little bit like it’s burbling. So that was how it originally worked. And we just did loads of them, you know, and this is, alongside all the other things we were doing, like, you know, gaming, and this, that and the other. And, Grover the brain, of course, you know, it was
a very, very busy part of my life, I’m having children as well. Very busy. Yes, all of so that’s how we got into it. It evolves massively, and very, very quickly into algorithmic and then different, almost like a kind of computer synthesis version of, and then it got into the taco Tron models, and then it’s evolved since that, as well. So there’s, it’s been a really interesting thing to do, what it has done is it’s given me a behind the scenes insight into not just text to speech, and which is the old way of saying it’s aI voices now, which I disagree with a little bit, because AI is very far from Ai. It is not artificially intelligent at all, it’s just an algorithm. But it is what it is. And I because of that I’ve
got a lot of knowledge about how the whole industry works, how the whole sector works. And also about, you know, the casting process, when you’re shortlisted down of those massive castings down to the very final one, they really want you, they really, really want you. So you have much more leverage than you think. And in fact, I was I was talking to a friend of mine, who was negotiating a game recently, who that they’d spent three or four months trying to find this one character. And I said to her, let, if they’re offering you the contract, now
you’ve got so much more leverage, you know, go and go for double. And she did and she got it. You know, and so it’s something to bear in mind.
Toby Ricketts
Absolutely. Yeah. And, I mean, like, it’s been a big part of the conversations that have happened in the voice world for the last two years, because it’s, that’s where it’s really it felt like about two years ago, it’s, it’s suddenly became mainstream. And lots of small companies picked up the taco Tron to model and they put their own, you know, front ends on it and started, everyone started, you know, saying this is gonna replace voices. So there were a bunch of different sort of assaults on VoiceOver, not only that, like our work could be replaced, but we could be hired to do the work and then not receive any kind of royalty, like on our voices could be used for anything, which is, you
know, in a few cases, especially the big standing case, which was kind of a landmark case from last year. That was proven to be kind of true. What do you think the biggest challenges are, where we are now because there’s, we know a lot more about how these models are, there’s a lot more knowledge about the fact that you know, your voice can be kind of like, quote, unquote, stolen? Yeah. What do you think the some of the challenges are? Where it stands?
Hugh Edwards
Well, there are a lot of challenges. So in the UK, we have a union called equity and equity are currently fighting a law that’s trying to be passed through Parliament at the minute, which is saying that the AI companies can freely data mine, anything that’s out there. So for example, they could go and data on any clips of you on YouTube and go and build a model from that. Wow. And you have no recourse for it. You can’t stop them doing it. So clearly that’s trying to be fought. That’s one challenge.
Toby Ricketts
Who came up with also On what basis like because I heard about this, and I thought it must be it must be not true, because it’s like, clearly ridiculous. But
Hugh Edwards
what it’s been there for a long time. The the the original law has been there even in EU law to be able to assist AI companies and getting started. But not to be able to use your likeness or use your voice or whatever. And the new iteration of the law is so wide open, that it would allow all those sorts of things, even though it doesn’t explicitly, explicitly say it, so that they’re trying to get the law tightened back down again.
Toby Ricketts
It’s concerning, isn’t it? Good Lord.
Hugh Edwards
It’s very concerning. Yeah. So that’s one kind of concern, then there are, it’s fair to say that it is a very chaotic market right now. And in chaotic markets, there is lots of opportunity from both sides, so that can be seen as a positive. But it also can be seen as a worry. And the Bev Standing case is a good example of that. Now, for anybody who’s not clued up on TTS, who’s interested or AI voices, go and have a look at the blog on grave the brain that I put on there. It’s about as comprehensive going through all of the different aspects of TTS and
the pitfalls currently, that we all know about and what to look out for, for certain jobs. Because there’s, there are lots of different types of jobs, there are training jobs, there are voice jobs. There are model based jobs. So yeah, it’s worth reading that blog so that you can you can get your head around it.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah, I might go do that. Because I’ve always been a bit a bit unclear about you know, what, what the difference is they say, it’s just been used to train an AI or what your voice won’t be used? And you’re like, Yeah, but if it’s training on my voice, it’s probably going to sound a bit like me, you know? So I’m sure you explain that in the article. But other?
Hugh Edwards
Well, yeah, just to get on to that. So I mean, you have a pitch pattern, a prosody pattern. So I can I can extract it’s called the, the F curve, I can extract that frequency curve, the frequency of your voice, and use that as a map to train a model without using your actual sound. Yeah, in exactly the same way, as auto tuners do, they work out what your what your pitch curve is, and then they adjust that. So this is not adjusting it. This is taking that as a template and putting it on. So it’s still not using your actual voice.
Toby Ricketts
But it does sound a lot like it’s it’s the prosody that is associated with my, my performance, if you like,
Hugh Edwards
Yeah, I mean, if you think of, I mean, lots of actors that are that are caricatures, Stallone or someone, you know, Stallone has that kind of same type of thing, you put that onto a model, it’s going to end up sounding a bit like Stallone, isn’t it even if it’s even if it’s an impersonator, so it’s a very unclear legal market at the moment, what is clear is that Pandora’s Box will never be shut again. Unless some EMP pulse kills all the world’s electronics, it’s here to stay right and it’s going to carry on. So I do think there’s a lot of opportunity in that chaos.
Gaming is a great example, where, once you create a TTS model, it sounds like that model. You know, if you if you’re really, really sad and unhappy, that it will, the model will come out like that. And so you can build character models, which is what they want for games. Once you’ve built one, it sounds like that character, and it will only perform like that character. So they’re not gonna go and put it in a different game, they might put it in the second iteration, but then I could have been in a different one. So it’s only going to be used for that game. So that’s a really good example of where an AI model can be really useful, where you’re paid to go and create the model, and then whatever usage but then they can use that in an online way to just generate content all the time. And the same, in the same sense.
Toby Ricketts
One of the best uses of AI that I’ve heard is dynamic content within within, you know, multiplayer games, or just all video games so that you can have, you know, you’ve got chatbots that come up with original texts. And it’s just, it’s just the next logical step of that to have a voice that reads it. And you’d never get an actor to read a billion pages of scripts so that you have every possible word combinations. So it’s, it does seem like the next logical step. And I liked the idea that that can be tied up to that character. So you know, as long as it’s the company that owns it, and you’re kind of either reimbursed very well to start off with the performance or there’s some kind of royalty, then it sounds like everyone could be happy.
Hugh Edwards
There are a couple of other good models, the the Evergreen version of yourself is also a good model, where you create yourself and then you use your model to fulfill long form or whatever it is you want to do. The only downside to that one is that the marketplace doesn’t exist properly for that yet. We’re all waiting for it to happen. I suspect it’s only really going to come in and then take off one once. Blockchain and NF T’s managed to sort out watermarking and traceability of of audio, because then you actually can track it and you don’t have to worry about the fact that your voice ends up on a sex doll or a porn site or whatever it is. Yeah. Which which is happening with with some TTS models,
Toby Ricketts
and voice 123 Sounds like they’re kind of dipping their toe into that arena is one of the big players you know, they’re getting heavily into into voice and, and making their own models of Have their their voices. So that’s kind of interesting dividends
Hugh Edwards
that the other one, I did a webinar the other day with a company called altered AI. And they have a really interesting one where they they’re doing speech to speech, which is different to text to speech. Yeah. So that speech to speech? Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it? Yeah, speech and speech is basically where you act out with a different person’s voice. So it’s analogous to motion capture where you’re putting on a suit. And then the end result has a different skin of you know, a different person or a gorilla, or whatever it may be. This is you putting on
a different voice. So, for example, I could act and have the voice be a child’s voice, or, you know, an 80 year old female’s voice, but I’m actually acting that voice out. So that’s another really interest. I mean, again, that opens huge moral and ethical dilemmas of how you charge it and performance based on usage. And it’s a very unknown area yet, but it’s very exciting, I think,
Toby Ricketts
yeah, absolutely, gosh, especially in sort of gaming, like you say, but the, the top games guys are just do every voice and just pitch shift into different roles.
Hugh Edwards
But you know, I mean, there’s, for the last few years, there’s been a very interesting debate going on, mainly at the voice conferences, about diversity, and about who should be doing certain jobs. And whether a white person should be doing a black person’s job, and whether someone from Samoa should be doing a French person’s job and this, that and the other. And it’s interesting, because traditionally, especially with gaming, the idea is that you’re, you have as much ability as possible, so that you can go and do your main character, and then go and do the French guy, and then go and do the German guy, and then do the wizard. And this and the other. And, I
mean, I’m not really sure where that debate ended, if it even has ended. And it’s an important debate to be having. But what is interesting about this, is that speech to speech is going to blow all that out of the water. Because how, I mean, you’ve then got the performance of someone doing it, and are they doing it authentically, and so on and so forth? And if they are, why bother using speech to speech in the first place? And you know what I mean, it’s a really interesting,
Toby Ricketts
yeah. How do you cast someone who’s, like by their voice whose voice is going to be radically altered?
Hugh Edwards
Right? Yeah. I mean, Andy Serkis has got away with it yet, because there aren’t any golems or King Kong’s he’s, he’s been alright. Yeah, but you’re fine.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah,
Hugh Edwards
that’s exactly
Toby Ricketts
how interesting yeah, very, very cool. So and like we say, gaming, big TTS has been big in your sort of career. I was gonna ask quickly about, like, tips for people who want to either get into TTS or, or direct, you know, TTS sessions, or whether we’re like, it’s it’s quite a niche, and he’s sort of a thing, but like, what’s the important thing to remember when someone is voicing for TTS or or or trying to get TTS voice sounds that consistency? Or is it now more authenticity? Would you say?
Hugh Edwards
That’s a really difficult question. I don’t know. Well, okay, let me go back to the stuff that I that I was casting, we had a specific word, and I can’t tell you what the word is because it will tell you who the company is. But it was kind of like, sort of TTS ish, right? So we would ask ourselves, okay, do they sound in the right kind of age bracket? Yes. Do they sound? Are they consistent? Yes. Am I going to be able to work with them? For that longer period? Yes. And that was just as big a consideration as well. Have they got good enough experience? Yes. And then the last one was, do they sound TTS ish. And that that one thing was the thing that got rid of 90% of the people who we were casting in the end.
And I don’t I cannot give you a written or verbal. This is what you have to do to be a TTS voice because anyone could do it. But to actually get the voice that everyone seems to want and like and hear that isn’t aggravating that sounds right. That’s warm in certain deliveries with certain text. That’s, that’s not too cold in other ones, you know, that can that can say that, you know, I don’t know. There was a Holocaust and a million Jews were killed. And that can also say that you’ve had a package delivered, and it’s still all work and still make sense and still be fluid, and it’s a really, really difficult thing. The only advice I can really say is be yourself, I guess. Maybe ever so slightly more positive than neutral as a voice.
So not big head jazz hands, but But you know, but not not unhappy so that you’re sounding warm and confident. Yeah. And another thing that’s massively, yeah, interesting. Cool. Funnily enough, I would say, if I were to give it a percentage, there were some people who were relatively inexperienced, out of the 48 that I cast, but I would say 95% of them had been pros for a long time, because they knew how to really control their voice. So yeah, experience counts for a lot as well.
Toby Ricketts
Cool. Very nice. All right, pivoting to gravy for the brain. We’ve got to talk about the name, because everyone asks, and I do know the story. And people asked me and I say, I can’t remember the story. It must not be that interesting. Am I correct?
Hugh Edwards
Okay. Well, no, it is quite interesting. So, this, it’s a bit of a clang, I’m afraid. It’s a family friend of my mother’s actually, a chap called Patrick Stewart. He’s an actor. Who did that one. Yeah. Who, who did a film. And it was called conspiracy theory. And there’s a bit where he jabs Mel Gibson in the neck with some truth serum. I think it is. And Mel,
Toby Ricketts
should work on Mel Gibson. That’s your work? Yeah.
Hugh Edwards
He jumps in there and Mel’s freaking out? And he says, what is it? And Patrick says It’s gravy. It’s gravy for the brain. And I thought what a lovely phrase. And I was we were looking when Peter and I was setting up to incorporate the company for not only something that had a URL available, but also something that that meant something that was that meant something to what we were trying to do. And actually originally a lot of people don’t know this is that grave, the brain was not set up just to do voice it was set up more as a sort of udimi type thing to do different types of courses. And in the very early years, we also recorded things like an art of service course, we did a drumming
course we did public speaking, we did lots of weird different types of courses. But it turns out that better what you know is what you’re good at. And me and Peter were good at voice. And so we kept focusing on it. And that’s where we got all the traction. So we ended up getting rid of everything else. But gravy for the brain meant food for thought. And so that’s what it kind of originally came from. But it had it had a bonus and it had a negative. The bonus was everyone remembered it. And secondly, that it didn’t have the word voice in it, funnily enough, because if you look at every single other company in our sector, they’ve all got the word voice and it’s somewhere. And it means
that SEO was really hard. Whereas for us it wasn’t. The negative, of course, is that you have to tell people what on earth it is. And so our marketing budget has been a little bit higher.
Toby Ricketts
We need to we need to take that phrase from the movie and somehow get right to use it. Can you use videos less than 10 seconds long or something? We just need to put that at the front of every all of our videos.
Hugh Edwards
Maybe? I’ll ask I’ll ask Patrick. Yeah, but yeah, it was his suggestion anyway.
Toby Ricketts
Oh, nice. And then we next next time you’re seeing it for a beer or something? years. So that’s pretty that’s that’s the year that does explain that I can I can remember that. I’m going to go away and look, look up the scene.
Hugh Edwards
It’s a really great film. You should watch it. Yeah, it’s Mel Gibson, Patrick Stewart and Julia Roberts.
Toby Ricketts
Big fan of Patrick Stewart. I think he’s, he’s, he’s fantastic. Yeah, so we’ve kind of covered you know, come up to Christmas, past, present and future. We’ve covered the past we’ve covered the present a little bit, I just want to end the present with like, what some of the big moments have been this year for like the voice world and for them for you sort of personally in the in the voice realm. Not the voice realm, the size, but
Hugh Edwards
I’d mentioned that. So for me personally, I’ve really enjoyed working on feature films in the last few years, and this year as well. I’ve literally just finished working on the fourth Expendables film, with Stallone and Statham and Megan Fox, which will be out early next year, I think. And I’ve done quite a few other films that highlight for me working with Martin Campbell, who’s a director who did Casino Royale and golden eye and things like that. And I worked on a couple of films with him. One called memory with Liam Neeson and guy. Oh, Australian actor, doesn’t it? ESM IPs, yes. And another one called the protege with Michael Keaton, and Sam Jackson, which was
great fun. So yeah, those are really, really it’s been an evolution, where I sort of graduated into the Hollywood films, which has been really, really good fun. And it’s also good for my CV and just massively fun to work on, you know, great party. Yeah, yeah, they are. They really are. And the Yeah, so and the premier has a friend too.
Toby Ricketts
So in the capacity of like, ADR direction, or like, what sort of how do you interface with the film?
Hugh Edwards
Yeah, ADR, with the principles and the secondaries, and then looping and doing the background looping tracks as
Toby Ricketts
well, right. Yeah. So is there, ADR? Now there’s been contention, because I’ve always taught it, that there’s a bunch of different ways. It’s either additional dialogue, replacement, or automated dialogue, replacement, or something else, which one of those
Hugh Edwards
so it all means the same thing. Those days, it was all historically based on the method that you used to do it. Nowadays, it’s all done on computers and keyboards and things like that. So it’s, it’s all just looping basically, crowds, and those sorts of things. The ADR stuff with the principal and the secondary characters, principle being the main actors, secondaries being the ones that are either on or off screen or put on for some other reason. That’s a skill in itself, because you have lip sync to do. And, or you’re replacing dialogue and replacing performance. And sometimes it doesn’t look right. And people forget about breathing. And the only downside to it for me is that,
unfortunately, it’s one of those things that you you have to be so analytical that’s kind of ruined films for me and TV shows. And now I can just hear ADR straightaway. And it’s just like, they’ve done this whole scene apart from that guy. That’s weird. Why would they not do that? While I’m watching it at the cinema, whereas I was oblivious to it before, like the vast majority majority of the world is, yeah,
Toby Ricketts
I was here that slight shift in tone, just like when I’m listening to audiobooks, and midway through sentence, I’ll be like, Oh, that’s a different recording day. Because something changes, like the mic position changes and like, and they their position changes and that everything changes. And I’m just like, oh, wow, that was different. Yeah,
Hugh Edwards
you have to have different ears, don’t you for this? Yeah. So for me, that’s probably the best thing. I also really enjoyed working on an animation this year, called jolt, which is just out, which is just out the film festivals. Now that was great fun. And then, I mean, seeing gravy grow, we’re just about to release a great for the brain, Africa, with Emeka, which is going to be great fun. So I’m really pleased about that. And I have to say, one voice Conference USA was a real highlight for me this year, because we couldn’t go last year. And it was, so it was the first one that I went to last year was just insane, because the US wouldn’t let anyone into the country. So we had to send Harry to
Mexico for two weeks to then go and run the conference from us, for us remotely, it was hell. So it was really good fun this year to go out there and see, see everyone and interact with everyone it was, it was great fun. For the voice world, the thing I’m most excited about really is speech to speech. I’ve been involved with that company, sort of behind the scenes, and it’s just got so much positive potential for the voice industry. I get sometimes people are a bit freaked out by AI voices, especially because of the the profit capacity and the and the pace
that it’s going, no one knows where it’s going to end up. And personally, I love that kind of chaos. Because as I say there’s opportunity there but but the speech or speech one is something you can really grab on to and it’s it’s actors performing. And it’s designed to do exactly that. So I think that’s going to be great.
Toby Ricketts
And like you say, it’s that’s such an interesting counterpoint to the, the very strong movement into into the world of like, like everyone I’ve talked to in real life, the last couple of years, I’ve asked them about the changes that have happened the industry in terms of diversity in terms of like representation on screen and that kind of thing, and how that there have been historical wrongs where where, you know, the wrong people were hired to perform something. And this does throw this really strange shaped spanner in the works in terms of like, it’s
now just about performance. And you just harm performance. It doesn’t actually matter what you sound like, which is it’s almost like a counterpoint to that, to that the pull of that to one way and to the other way. So yeah, I find it very interesting.
Hugh Edwards
Yeah, I would say on that note, just as a quick tip for everybody out there with your voice contracts, and hands up everybody who is using a voice contract in every job they do. As I asked a conference the other day, and I and two people out of 100 put their hands up. So firstly, make sure you are. But in those voice contracts, you should be saying for every type of job you have now that your voice may not be used for any inclusion in future TTS, or speech to speech or any synthetic voice models whatsoever in the history of the future without my
consent, because, theoretically, if you’ve done an audio book for someone in the past, and you haven’t got that, they can then just go and create a model from it obviously own the rights to that one. Yeah, so the text, they’ve got the voice, text, they’ve got the speech, they can do great model with that. Can you absolutely for now. So just start putting it in your contracts? Good idea. Something you need to do. Yeah, that’s, that’s
Toby Ricketts
a very good idea. Absolutely. Is it better to be a voice artist today? or 20 years ago? Yeah, I thought I thought there was.
Hugh Edwards
No. You said yes or no. But then, then oh, now? I think it’s just different. You know, I mean, the everything’s a bit rose tinted, isn’t it? You know, I mean, I remember sort of thinking when I was younger God, I wish I was sort of born in the 60s so that I would have been around in the 70s. And then I, then I would have been a rock star. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because it’s just like to flooded now, and all this crap that you come up with when you’re in your teens, and you’re failing. So, yeah, I mean, okay, it was good. 20 years ago. But again, you
had to be brilliant. And it was difficult, because you were driving all the way around the country, you know, to radio stations everywhere. So you didn’t get to see your family as much. There wasn’t anywhere near as much voice work in the market. So yes, there wasn’t as many voice artists. Yeah, they weren’t p2p sites. But there’s so much more than eight so higher. Yeah. But then, you know, I mean, I still know people who are six, seven figure earners now, you know, and that’s, that’s not a lie. That’s true. Yeah. So you just got to be good at? Yeah, so six openings still applies,
Toby Ricketts
those six or seven earners can now rock up to their home studio, in their pajamas. And, like work for about a quarter of the time that they would have had to before?
Hugh Edwards
Exam? Yeah. In your pants now, and we wouldn’t even know exactly,
Toby Ricketts
yeah, I’ll leave you to, to just, you know, do on their own for that. And the fact that I it’s just amazing how the how the walls are falling down around, you know, where you have to be like, you know, geographically and I’m in the middle of the New Zealand jungle. And like, I still do all this work. And and yeah, I love that about that. It’s it has democratized and a bunch of ways the industry.
Hugh Edwards
Absolutely. I mean, there are all that many positives of from the pandemic, but one positive for our industry is that it is exactly done that it’s taught, or it’s forced companies to understand that it’s okay, and that we’ve invested and we sound good at home. Yeah. And that you don’t need to go and pay a studio. And on that note, charge studio fees people, because very few people are
Toby Ricketts
like, Well, yeah, it’s one of those things now that you can put it on a
Hugh Edwards
line item in an invoice and say, here’s the 100 is a 200 pound for my voice. Here’s the 50 pound usage. And here’s the three hours 50 pound studio that I did. Okay.
Toby Ricketts
And yeah, so that’s what they’ll do. Yeah. Unless you’ve gone for on those auditions that said, you know, client will use complimentary studio.
Hugh Edwards
Yeah, who does that? Who writes client will give me that studio for free on an audition.
Toby Ricketts
Cool. Well, I have covered I think just about everything on my list. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that that you wanted to talk about?
Hugh Edwards
Well, look at that nice little row of One Voice Awards. I’ve just realized you. Behind you one. Yes,
Toby Ricketts
yes. Above the whiskey.
Hugh Edwards
For all Toby when Toby started working for us. He wasn’t then allowed to work to enter into the One Voice Awards anymore.
Toby Ricketts
It’s such a shame. Even check the terms and conditions for the Vox awards the other day, but damn, I can’t do that either. Sorry, right.
Hugh Edwards
It wouldn’t be cool. Thank you very much for having me on. i It’s lovely to be on Oceania for once
Toby Ricketts
again. Absolutely. Um, what is what’s planned for Christmas? It’s coming up very soon sooner than I thought it was.
Hugh Edwards
is ridiculous, isn’t it? So Christmas is going to be a very small affair. My children are Christmas evening with their mother for Christmas Eve and I’ve got on Christmas Day. I think Gareth program is going to come over some lunch and it’s going to be a very intimate small sober affair. Yeah,
Toby Ricketts
I bet you’d be the best they really can. Yeah, especially in the winter of the I kind of miss I do miss a British winter Christmas because
Hugh Edwards
very cold here over here six Italy. Freely cheese.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah. Now it’s it got up to about 30 here today. So yeah, some comparison I can use. So I got to the beach on Christmas Day, I think. But yeah, I’m really looking forward to seeing you all over there in May for the one was conference and One Voice Award. Absolutely. Yeah, I’ve already booked my tickets. So I am given. Yeah, but we’ll talk more about that because of the time.
Hugh Edwards
Indeed, indeed. Well, thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Toby Ricketts
Thank you very much for for coming on. It’s been great. Take care everyone.
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