Voice and Casting Editing and Proofreading Services

Forty voice actors record the same eleven lines and thirty-eight of them are wrong — not badly performed, but pitched at a character nobody described. The brief said "warm, friendly, authoritative, 35–45, conversational but with gravitas", which is four contradictory instructions and a decade. The two who got it close had worked with the studio before and were guessing from memory.

We edit what casting directors, voice studios and production companies produce — character breakdowns and casting briefs, session specifications and direction notes, audition and self-tape instructions, usage and buyout terms for voice work, script formatting and pronunciation guides, talent booking and confirmation documents, and the feedback that goes back after a session. Our editors work on briefs that produce the right performance the first time.

The character breakdown and session spec is what determines whether a casting call is a search or a lottery, and its failure is a list of adjectives that cancel each other out. A performer can only play a decision, and adjectives are not decisions. We work through these so the character is given a situation rather than a set of qualities — who they are talking to, why, and what they want from the listener — since a person explaining something to a friend and a person announcing something to a room produce different reads and no adjective distinguishes them; so the contradictory pairs are resolved before the brief goes out, because "authoritative but warm" leaves the performer choosing and the studio rejecting; so one reference is given with what to take from it and, more usefully, what not to take, given that a reference alone gets imitated wholesale; so the technical requirements are specified — the pace in words per minute or the exact duration, the mic distance, the level of processing, whether breaths are wanted — as these decide whether a take is usable; so any pronunciation, product name or foreign term is written phonetically in the script rather than in a separate document; so the audition instruction says how many takes, which lines and whether variation is wanted; so the usage and buyout are stated at the audition stage, since a performer needs to know what they are pricing; and so the brief says what the previous attempt got wrong if there was one. Briefs written this way cast in one round.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including scripts, casting material and talent information. We are editors rather than casting directors or voice professionals, and we offer no view on performance, casting or rates. What we can do is turn the adjectives into something a performer can act.