And so, I wrote a short script for my movie and used a “voice design” technology to generate the speech from my text/script (english). It is so natural and human-like that you honestly cannot tell the difference. At least - I can’t.
The final result was this 10 minutes short-film documentary.
Everything visual is made using Blender, even the stock footage or my own video from The Viking Museum Fyrkat is at the very least colorgraded or composited in Blender. The video-editing was done in Blender’s Video Sequence Editor.
The soundtracks are all my own compositions.
I hope you will enjoy my film.
I certainly enjoyed making it
A truly magnificent achievement. Telling a story that (of course) I never knew, and telling it extremely well.
“I know that I have heard that narrator’s voice before,” but I never knew where it came from. Can you give us more details about what it is, and where and how you found it? Little things, like the ways you show during the timeline that so-and-so was killed, succeeded, or (by means of a focus-pull …!) narrowly escaped. This is great stuff.
This, truly, is “a documentary as good and well-crafted as any I have ever seen.” The story-line and repeated use of visuals is excellent. And the music works beautifully throughout. Any museum would be very proud to show it – and you should offer it to them, if you haven’t already.
Next . . . (!) . . . I look forward to a very thorough “making of” presentation . . . start to finish.
The voice is a “Voice Design” from ElevenLabs, meaning it is 100 % synthetic, according to ElevenLabs. It may sound like someone you’ve already heard before, though still different, or you may indeed have heard it before as others have used it too. It’s label says “Storytelling”, “Calm” etc. so this voice design may indeed have been used by others before in audio books, TV etc.
I’ve have shown my film to museums, and so far I’m awaiting their official opinion of it. I hope they would like me to do another film about the same tower, but in Danish with a real human voice-over.
I am entirely sure that they will be very interested in it. If they are interested in this topic, they will be interested in this film – and possibly, in buying more such films from you! This is a very solid product.
A Danish “voice-over” would be very easy to do: many kiosk displays actually have a button by which the audience can choose among languages.
You should also expect to be asked to provide closed-captioning in each language. Which is also very easy to do. (Maybe “outside of Blender.”)
