Welcome to our first blog post. We will aim to use the blog to keep you up to date with our latest news. I’ll start with a bit of background on how our little studio came to be.
My name is Carrie Forbes and I’m a Scottish Voiceover Artist, living in the Highlands. For years I’ve worked from a home studio but the space was quite cramped and I knew I needed a larger space. I had the technology for directed sessions in my home studio but I was always embarrassed about any of my clients seeing my recording set up. There was no extra space in the home to expand the recording space, so in 2019 I began to look for a commercial studio building in my local town of Tain.
I found the perfect space in 2020 and it’s less than 1 mile from my home. At this stage, I was still focusing on the studio being a space to record my own voiceover work, I hadn’t really contemplated rented the space out to others.
Over the next couple of years more enquiries came in from production companies, VO agents and people filming in the Highlands – all wanting to hire the studio for their productions. I started to adapt the set up to cater for each of the studio hire jobs – this included buying new microphones, interfaces, chairs, lighting etc. In 2024 the changes are continuing with lots more infrastructure adjustments to come.
I have worked with lots of different studio hire clients on some very exciting productions. Some of the VO actors live locally, others have been here on holiday or working in the Highlands. Prior to finding the studio, these actors were having to travel 8 hour round trips to the Scottish Central Belt to record their voice over work. The actors that live here now have a much better work / life balance as they can record their VO work locally. It also allows them to respond quickly to requests for auditions or voiceover jobs with tight timescales. If they were still travelling to Edinburgh or Glasgow, they would have missed out on these opportunities.
To date, most of our clients have been London based with others from as far away as Madrid and Los Angeles. Some of the clients previously used to have to send expensive audio recording equipment up to the Highlands and then had to talk the actors through how to set it all up. I’ve been told that this can be quite a stressful process for both parties!
The Scottish Highlands is a very popular filming location and there have been some amazing productions working up here. My mission now will be to try and let these companies know that VO production is possible in the Highlands. I’m hoping it will help to save these companies both time and money.
I’ve been asked about ADR recording and while this is possible for animation productions, it has not been possible for film production. This is changing and we hope to have ADR capability very soon.
I’ll leave you with some pics of the studio prior to the renovation – it was previously a Barber shop. Frankie the barber was famous in these parts and was still working in his 90’s.
