The Story of Overklank Dubbing Studios, South Africa

We recently caught up with Stef Albertyn owner of Overklank Dubbing Studios and to get his thoughts on localization technology to dub Turkish episodic melo-dramas into a local language - Afrikaans.

When was Overklank founded?

“I have been involved in audio post-production for more than thirty years and was almost exclusively involved in language dubbing for the latter half of the 1980s. Language dubbing slowly declined in South Africa but was awakened from its deep sleep a little more than a year ago when a local broadcaster, E-TV decided to venture into dubbing Turkish melodramas into Afrikaans, one of 11 local languages. My partner, Jaco Loubser, felt it was a good job creation opportunity and we started Overklank Pty Ltd, primarily to dubbing. We are planning on expanding our language base over the next few years.”‍

What was the primary driver to set up the business?

“Job creation. Here in South Africa, we have huge unemployed youth issues to resolve. Dubbing requires a range of skill across the workflow making it an ideal vehicle to up-skill and employ youth.”

What are the primary areas of the business?

“Overklank is focussed on dubbing and ancillary services including captioning.”

What are the key workflow problems to solve?

“Reporting across multiple studios and projects is an ongoing problem to address. As a workaround, I created a FileMaker database to track project progress across our 4 recording studios, three in Cape Town and one in Johannesburg. The database imports progress reports from VoiceQ’s native application and creates group reports. There is room to improve the time efficiency of the process as we move from weekly to daily reporting.  We are very excited about the launch of VoiceQ Cloud - which I believe will go a long way to solving reporting, script adaptation and collaboration for us. Delivering projects with high-quality recording is one aspect, but the myriad of client changes and corrections can become a handful.”

What are the key sector and consumer trends driving change?

“Without doubt - cloud management of shared resources! and faster access and availability of foreign origin media.”

‍Why did you choose Voice Q as a workflow solution?

“We first used VoiceQ back in 2007 on a children’s series to replace set dialogue across dozens of episodes, and it worked really well!  Competitively VoiceQ offers the biggest feature set and its immersive rythmo-band method is, in my opinion, the most accurate way of dubbing. Our project quality validates that the sync and acting quality is better.

The moment we decided to venture into full-time language dubbing we contacted Jill Tattersall one of the owners at VoiceQ. She provided us with great insights and made it easy to purchase and implement. It would be hard to look elsewhere given the generous level of support we and our team of contract writers received. Financially it made sense when we purchased the first license and even more now. For us there was really no other solution.”

What features of VoiceQ are the most value?

“For us it is the ability to cue with multiple methods! VoiceQ is also super stable and we have never had issues with video files getting stuck etc. There also many new innovations that we would not be able to live without - recording progress on characters, the ability to import and export almost any script, spreadsheet or ADR sheet.  Honestly, the biggest feature of VoiceQ is that it gets the job done in a smart way, day in and day out.  As an example we have never cancelled a single voice artist in any of our studios because of issues with VoiceQ!”

What is your perception of VoiceQ Support and R&D?
“VoiceQ publishes very regular updates which not only resolve bug fixes, but always contain a new feature or workflow enhancement. Two issues we’ve encountered were responded to by support very quickly. One which resolve with user training issue and small bug fix.  Our perception is that VoiceQ R&D keeps iterating without breaking what already works - which is rare with software applications these days.”

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