Voices of, er, Egg-cellence.

Have you ever wondered what happens to your script, once it’s been printed out, read out loud into a VERY expensive microphone, polished up into beautiful spoken-word audio, and sent to you in whichever file format you desire? No, of course you haven’t.

 

Even so, I’ll tell you (because I’m nice like that.)

 

Most of the scripts we get are quite short, sent by fax or email, and the best way to get them into the studio and then processed for invoicing is to do a good old “rip and read” – printing off a single piece of paper and reading from that. It’s the best way, really, because we can make notes on the script itself, as many scripts are re-written several times by the client during a session!

 

However, if we’re reading a long corporate narration, we’ve found the iPad to be an essential business tool (as well as great for playing Scrabble on during flights, but that’s by the by.) It doesn’t have a fan, so it’s completely silent (unlike a laptop) and although there are green issues surrounding all electronic gadgets, using it certainly saves an awful lot of paper.

 

So if you’re going to run a business like ours efficiently, but still try to be environmentally aware, what’s the best way to make sure you’re not wasting mountains and mountains of precious paper?

 

Easy. Print on both sides (obviously), but then what? Of course, after they’ve been put through for invoicing, we need to shred the scripts because many are commercially-sensistive, so everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – is shredded for security purposes, so we can’t even recycle them as scrap.

 

So… every couple of days, we trot down to our dear friend and neighbour’s house with a few carrier bags full of shredded paper, which becomes lovely nesting material for his chickens. If we’re lucky, he’ll exchange our offering for half a dozen eggs.

 

That, as they say, is a win-win situation. Your scripts are recycled, and made into bedding for a collection of very happy hens indeed, who supply us with eggs, which are used to bake cakes for when YOU come to visit.

 

I’m not sure whether or not there’s any such thing as “carbon-neutral voiceovers” but if there is, your scripts are bringing us one step closer 🙂