When I led my Voice Acting Workshop panel at Furry Fiesta '10, I lectured for the first hour, then let people come up to record their voices for the second hour. I learned something very quickly: the second hour was FUN. The first hour was NOT.

So, I was determined to change the format of my panel when I held it again at FA: United 3 last weekend. I still felt it was important to spend time training everyone in how to properly speak into a microphone before bringing them up, so instead of lecturing everyone, I came up with a tiny 1-page, 3-character script to record and edit live in front of everyone.

This recording is what got produced. It's not exactly what I made in front of everyone, since I did re-edit and remix this in my home studio. But all the dialogue was recorded in Terrace C at FA: United 3, and I did bring all the sound effects heard with me to the panel. I was able to put together a rough edit and mix of the final recording for everyone before the first hour was up and we moved on to recording lines for the podcast.

Long time FBA podcast fans will recognize this as being a modified version of a cutaway from an earlier episode. I wanted to make the characters generic, so that I could use male or female voices for all the roles. (I was ready to change the line "He's a rabbit." to "She's a rabbit.", so you know.) And I figured a new joke would make it more fun for the regular FBA fans, since I did have a couple in the audience.

All in all, I think this new format was a big hit. While I didn't get to go over nearly as much information as I did at TFF (importance of compression, audio recording hardware, how to soundproof a room...), I think everyone had a lot more fun. And it's nice to be able to have something 90% complete at the end of the convention that I can quickly post up on FA like this! One complaint I did get was that at one point during the first hour, I had to sit and cut for 3 minutes without talking, which left everyone having to entertain themselves for a bit. A few folks made the point they wanted to see what I was doing, so I think maybe the next thing to try is getting a video projector or monitor or something into the panel so that everyone can watch me cut the audio together.

Making a good panel is absolutely a process, but I think I was able to improve things quite a bit between this one and the last! I hope my third panel will be even more fun for the guests. Anyway, hope you like this clip we recorded!

Since these characters don't have names that you can identify, I'll just put this in order of appearance:

Wolf voiced by Nomad

Rabbit voiced by Riyo

Official voiced by Cooper Tom