English Voice Over

V&A Museum of Childhood — Small Stories

Five actors, around eighteen characters, and nearly three hours of audio for a dolls' house collection.

Actors cast

3–4

Voices per actor

~3 hrs

Of finished audio

Client profile

The V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green — today Young V&A — holds the national collection of childhood objects, including one of the finest collections of dolls' houses anywhere. Its exhibitions are built for a family audience, which means interpretation has to work for a seven-year-old and their grandmother at the same time.

Project overview

In the summer of 2014 the Museum was preparing Small Stories: At Home in a Dolls' House, and wanted audio storytelling to form a key strand in the interpretation — the dolls themselves telling the stories of the houses they lived in. It was a new approach for the Museum. We were selected from a range of studios at the tender stage to record and produce the series of scripts, in English UK.

Casting

This was not a narration job. Each doll storyteller needed a distinct character, so we put forward samples of potential actors for each role and worked with the Museum's team until they had the voices they wanted. Five actors were cast — Charlotte, Roland, Daniella, Rebecca and Al — and each took on three or four separate voices, so five performers covered around eighteen characters between them. All of it was recorded in our own Central London studios with the Museum's exhibitions team in the room.

Sound design

Our engineer worked with the curatorial team on the sound design rather than simply capturing the reads, experimenting with effects and editing to build character and drama around each voice. Studio time was used to agree the creative direction while the Museum's team were present, so the detailed work could be completed afterwards without another session.

Delivery

The finished audio came to nearly three hours, and almost none of it was delivered as three hours. A visitor meets a guide one short piece at a time, so it was split into individual files to the Museum's own breakdown and handed over in the format their playback took. Post-production was turned round quickly. This is the part of an audio project that decides whether the files load on the day or have to be renamed and reconverted the week you open.

Outcome

The audio became a core element of the exhibition's aim to engage a wide family audience. In the Museum's own words, we provided “a creative and characterful addition to our exhibition” and “brought our ideas to life” — and the process was “smooth and enjoyable”, which for a first-time approach in a national museum is most of the point.