Audiobooks
Roberto Mighty directs and produces NY Times Bestselling audiobooks for major and emerging publishers and authors, including Harpercollins, Random House, Houghton-Mifflin, Regents Prentice Hall, and many others.
Roberto has been involved in producing, writing, directing or vocalizing hundreds of character voices over the years--first in countless radio commercials near the beginning of his career, later in his critically-acclaimed "Banquo's Wagon™" children's video series, and recently in various blockbuster audiobooks, augmented reality projects, websites, films and videos.
Listenability: “I like to review the abridgment for “listenability,” and then forget all that and just listen to the reader as if I’d never heard of the book, the story, or the Author. If it isn’t compelling and understandable from moment to moment, I roll up my sleeves and go to work on the performer and/or the text.”
The Audience of One: ”Audiobook listening should be a very intimate experience. I try to impress upon the reader that he/she is performing for an audience of one.”
Perform vs. Read: ”Here’s what I try to get across to narrators: It’s not a reading in a studio. It’s a performance for all time. And we want to people to be blown away. Forever.”
Roberto’s Character Map: "I work with the Reader (sometimes the Author, sometimes a prominent Actor) and the Recording Engineer to create a ‘character map’. Every time we come to a previously established voice characterization (which might have been a day or two earlier in recording studio time), I pause recording and play back a few seconds of that characters' voice sample for the Reader, so they can refresh their memory about what they’d created for that character. Here and there I might make a suggestion or two about a characters' tonality, timbre, intensity, dramatic interpretation, breathiness, raspiness vs. clarity, age, voice positioning, etc. It’s all part of making a great audiobook that will engage, delight and immerse listeners.”
