Community member Anthony Dominello aka 'Proposal Guy' who is now aka 'Happily Married Guy' would like some help and advice from the community with tips on how to disguise the identity of an interviewee. Over to you Anthony....
I have a client who I do regular work for who wants me to edit an interview as normal, but he wants me to in one case disguise the voice of the interviewee, if possible even to the point at which an accent cannot be determined. Having seen several time when this was done, I have some ideas but I wanted to see if anyone on the team or in the community has done this in such a way as it is not easily undone (like a simple pitch shifting). This is not a legal or criminal matter, but involves someone who doesn't want to be readily recognized by their voice because of the personal nature of some of the things they will be dealing with.
Hiding someone's accent seems like a near impossibility without full-on ADR (a fact about which I've advised my client), so that's optional, but other types of obscuring method or methods would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Anthony, let me kick of with two suggestions.
Use a pitch changing plug-in and adjust the pitch by only a couple of semitones. The challenge is that to protect the identity of the interviewee, you need to change the pitch a lot but then it isn't very pleasant to listen too. So I but push the Formants by much more to improve the disguise without having to pitch shift too much.
However for me the only safe way is to revoice the the interviewee, which I have done many times. You do need a good actor who can deliver the same passion and intensity as the interviewee, but can work very well and makes it a very good listen.
But What techniques and tools do you use? It would be great to help Anthony out with some different solutions.