In celebration of the latest Chronicles of Tavara Tinker, The New World, Brick Cave Media took the time to interview Melanie Frasier. Melabie has been the voice of the series for it's audio book editions since the first published Le Tour de Paris in 2015. Although born in South Africa, most of her professional training was in the UK at a leading theatre arts centre and the Royal Ballet School. Melanie's career started out in childrens' radio programmes for the British Council and later as an actress, singer and dancer in theatre, television, cabaret and film.
This is part 1 of this interview. Part 2 can be found here.
Q: The New World represents your third Tavara Tinker adventure you have voiced, were there any new challenges in the latest work for you as a voice talent?
As there had been a gap of a few years after the second book, one of the challenges was to voice the characters to be as close as possible to the earlier two books. Also, there were a few American accents to add to the mix!
Q: Share with us the story of how Melanie came to be a voice talent.
After many years as an actress, singer and dancer in theatre, TV and film followed by a long break from performing, I then resumed these activities and also trained as a voice over artist. I worked on various platforms on several voice over projects – some demos of which are on my website: https://melaniefraser-voice.com. Later, I trained with Beeaudio on their course of studio engineering for audio book narration. Subsequently, I set up my home studio and have mainly done long-form narration over the past few years. This includes researching, recording, editing and mastering to completed production ready for retail.
Q: Bob and Sharon keep the stories for Tavara pretty action focused, talk about how your voice work adapts to the tone of a particular work.
The Tavara Tinker books are fast-paced and action-packed and this was exciting to do as I was also able to add sound effects to reflect the tension.
Q: Aside from Tavara and Jonathan, who would you say is your favorite character to voice and why?
Ah, this is a difficult one as they are all such fun characters to do. Probably Sasha as she is headstrong and yet there is a lot of humour in her relationship with the others.
Q: As a voice talent, you have voiced a number of great works. What do you look regarding the quality of a work before deciding to engage with it?
I do like a fast-paced story but I also enjoy humour and emotional drama. The most important thing is that the story is well-written grammatically and flows. I feel that if I am entertained and engaged by the story, hopefully the listeners will be too.
Learn more about Melanie & The Chronicles of Tavara Tinker
Melanie can be found online at: https://www.melaniefraser-voice.com/
More about The New World, the latest release of The Chronicles of Tavara Tinker, can be found here: More about The New World
