Working with Harry Potter

Its impossible to overlook the hype that the new Harry Potter film is garnering. It reminds me of a session we did with Daniel Radcliffe (the actor who plays Harry in the film series) earlier this year.

We do a a good bit of high- end audio recording, both in our studio voice booth and on location.  One of our audio clients is The Poetry Archive ( http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do ). Their goal is to provide high quality audio recordings of Poets and Poetry.   Based in the UK, they usually use us to record their New York Poets.

For some reason, Daniel Radcliffe was approached to read a poem of his choice.  He chose a Shakespeare sonnet.

Interestingly, when working with Daniel, everything is coordinated with his father; all email and subsequent logistics are arranged through him. Since Daniel was appearing in Equus, our quest for a convenient and quiet place to record deposited us in his subterranean dressing room for the session.

Daniel was a complete professional and easily gave us a high quality performance.

Our portable audio recording setup yields superb results. We use a classic microphone, an AKG 451 connected to a Fostex PCM digital audio recorder (with custom mic-pre’s from Oade Brothers www.oade.com).

After the session, I understood a key reason why this film series has been so successful: the star is an actor’s actor, a true professional.

We have more interesting audio stories. Maybe soon I will tell the story of working with Norman Mailer on Cape Cod.

You can hear the audio recording, and others, in the samples area of our web site: http://www.multimediavideo.com/capabilities.php#audioSamples

Daniel Radcliffe reads Shakespeare