Gollum & Smeagol Voice Over by Atticus Mullikin: LOTR The Two Towers

I t’s been a long time since I posted any updates. I’ve been very busy since December, when I uploaded my last Audiobook sample. In the meantime, I’ve learned to use Adobe Premiere to edit video content. This latest project is a scene from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, where Gollum and Smeagol are talking to ‘one another’. Although I was proud of the result, it just didn’t have the same impact without the visuals. The ground-breaking motion-capture animation that brought Gollum to life with Andy Serkis’s stunning performance just makes the experience. If I’m to emulate Serkis here, I should do it right. And so here is my first video production.

Time to go video

It was difficult to get even close to Serkis’s audio performance. It’s murder on your throat. Serkis drank ‘Gollum Juice’ with lemon and honey to keep his voice working during filming. I took the advice and made some myself. Also interesting is that, apparently, Gollum was in part based on the sound of Serkis’s cat vomiting. Oh the noble ideas of humble origin.

ALL of the audio here is completely redone, with only the original video remaining. The music is a small section of The Dead Marshes, from the extended soundtrack of LOTR: The Two Towers, with the opening repeated and a crescendo from later in the music moved earlier for dramatic effect.

Gollum and Smeagol are, of course, me, Atticus Mullikin, including the labored breathing at the beginning and the gasps and laughs. There are a few sound effects thrown in, including several from creators over on Freesound.org:

Frogs – A heavily cut version of ‘frogs’ by sweetjuniper

Evil One Ring Sound at beginning – A combination of two sounds, ‘Eerie Ambient Bed 1’ by ztrees and ‘The sound of wind comes from the tunnel 2 (Longer)’ by harpoyume.

Gollum & Smeagol SoundCloud version (audio only)

The creators and producers of the 2012 movie Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers hold all copyrights to this project’s content (save sound effects). This is a fan production that promotes the film and the media in question. It will never be monetized in any way. If the copyright holders have any issue with this content, please let me know.

Cleaning up my content

I also thought, ‘If I’m going to publish video, and create a YouTube channel to host the content, it needs to be done right. I devoted some extra time to learning how to create titles and an animated logo screen to put at the beginning and the end of my content. It would be great to pretend that I created these things from scratch, but of course I used YouTube vids by others to learn how to do it. I think it’s important to give them credit.

I learned to create the animated logo by watching a video from Cinecom, though I don’t understand why it needed to be created in Photoshop first and exported. In the end, I started over and made the animation in Premier directly. Perhaps I missed something in this, but it works. You can watch the animation I created at the end of my Gollum/Smeagol video.

Creating an animated logo required that I make a logo to begin with. I’d scrapped the old AtticusInk logo that I had on my website, as it just didn’t really convey what I do now, and replaced it with the letters ‘A M V O’ inside a circle, for ‘Atticus Mullikin Voice Over’. But this was only temporary. The more I looked at the circle and letters, though, the more an idea took shape for me. I added a microphone in the background to bring in the audio component of my work, and then I realized that the circle looked like a pop-filter, and then the logo really came together.

The title creation methods were copied almost exactly from a video by Ignace Aleya. I used a different font, but that was about it.

Coming soon

During my long hiatus, I also recreated a scene from the Lego Batman Movie, which will be up next week. And I’ve been reworking my old audio stuff into video, when and where it’s possible. Soon there will be video versions of my Scream trailer recreation and some other early stuff. I’ll also publish my three audiobook projects, the two from Wyrd Sisters and the one from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, along with a 4th I recorded in the meantime.

Atticus Mullikin Fixit: at least half of my time is devoted to my Voice Over business, but the other half is devoted to building my skills as a fixit man. For almost a year now, I’ve been learning to fix iPhones, computers, bikes, appliances, and many other things. I’ll be creating a separate page for my Fixit projects and posting my experiences.

Perhaps eventually I’ll post blog updates as video as well, though I’m still not sure about that. If you’d like to see that, let me know.

Of course, this is an homage by a fan of the movie, and all copyrights remain with the original creators.