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The Gatekeeper writes...

It looks like my question got lost in the crash, so I will try to recreate it.

I was wondering how the voice recording was done. In one of your ramblings you mentioned that some careful editing was done of the voice tracks to make the timing of the dialogue smoother. This makes it sound like each voice actor was recorded separately. Was this actually the case? I would have thought that it would be easier for the actors to be able to play off of each other as they are reading in order so get into the proper mood of the action.

I was also wondering which comes first, the voice recording or the animation? If the voice recording is done first, are the actors filmed so that the animators can transfer some of the facial expressions to the characters? There are some animation shows where the mouth movements do not even remotely correspond to the dialogue. That is very distracting to me; I have never had that feeling with Gargs.

Greg responds...

As often as possible, we tried to get the entire cast together. But that wasn't always possible. Jonathan and Marina had Star Trek duties. Keith spent most of the second season in New York doing Seven Guitars on Broadway. And etc.

But even when we did have people together, you need to understand that we'd occasionally mix and match everyone's takes. Sometimes Jeff's best take might be number three. And Thom's was number one. And Bill's was number two. Why not take their best takes if we can? And we could. So we did. Also sometimes we wanted the dialogue to overlap. But if we record it overlapped, then it makes it hard for the Track Reader to instruct our overseas animators on the lip synch. So we'd record the lines separately, and then overlap them in our edits.

Voice Recording almost always comes BEFORE animation. In TV, we generally do not film the voice actors. We don't have a budget for that step.

Response recorded on July 10, 2000