Life.

About a week or so ago, I got an e-mail from one of the teachers that works at our school part-time, asking if I wanted to do some voice work. Thinking that it sounded pretty damn cool, I said yes.

On Thursday last week he gave me the script to read over. As it turns out, the script was for an (English) listening test that’s part of the junior high school entrance exams in Shiga prefecture. I read the girl parts (that were all highlighted in pink, quite fitting for me personally) and my boss was asked to read the male lines (of course, they were all highlighted in blue).

I practiced a little bit at home before I went, but the actual recording took place this morning. I met with my boss and the other teacher, and we all headed over to the recording studio together. There, we met the gentleman who was in charge of the test as well as the technician that would be helping us record. Everyone was so ridiculously nice.

So we did some introductions and they brought us coffee. I don’t normally drink coffee, but I felt bad not drinking it since they went to the trouble to bring it. I mean, I think I’ve had coffee maybe two or three times in my entire life. I am a tea girl. But, feeling obligated, I loaded that bad boy up with milk and sugar, and ended up downing the whole thing (not in one gulp, mind you). When that stuff hit me, I felt kind of wired. I felt like this looks > O_O! (for lack of a better description).

Admittedly, I was nervous going in. Even though everyone had given me some pointers, I wasn’t too sure how fast to speak and whatnot. It ended up being a lot of fun, and I felt like such a pro sitting in that little booth with the headphones on, haha. It took about an hour and a half to get everything done, and although I’ve never done it before, I don’t think we had to do too many parts over again.

To break things up, here’s a not so hot photo of me and another of me and my boss in the little room. Since I have a pea-sized head, I had to make the headphones pretty small. The second photo the technician and the man who was in charge took from the control room. It was really sweet of them and they kept trying to get the best angle with the lighting.

There was one part where I had a bit of a monologue. Since it was long, there was more room for error. I had to do one part over again, but I kept apologizing (like us Canadians tend to do). I guess it was funny (I’m going to pretend it’s endearing, haha) because they were laughing and telling me it was okay and I didn’t need to say sorry, haha. The great thing was that Charles (the gentleman who organized and recruited me) was so nice and encouraging the whole time. He made it really comfortable.

I’d love to do something like this again. They do recordings for this specific test twice a year, so if they like what I did, they may ask me back. It’s crazy to think students are going to be listening to my voice during an exam.

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