If there's a will there's a way: prevention in the voice acting booth

Voice acting is one of the activities that kept going on at the beginning of quarantine in March, even though it was not an essential service. That is due to a bureaucracy issue: the working activities in Italy are labeled through ATECO classification codes, and while the movie productions are in category 59, voice acting is in 59.12. This labels it as “post cinematographic post-production of videos and television programs” essential activity.

Of course, dude to the nature of acting in the proximity of other actors, voice acting is not a safe activity during a pandemic. Voice actors decided on their own accord to interrupt the works until the end of national lockdown, which is the hardest phase of quarantine. While we had to still wait for several weeks before we could move freely, a famous voice acting studio, PUMAIS DUE, was already preparing to go back to work. 

Fiamma Izzo, one of the funding siblings of PUMAIS DUE and voice actress, explained in an interview the new rules to work in the studio.

“A crazy race against time, where nothing was left to chance, but every detail was carefully thought out: I even bought one of those machines - used in operating rooms - for ozonation and sanitization of environments. Then, obligatory masks: they’re given by us at every entrance, together with shoe covers and carpets; and still, special glass sheets to separate the staff. Every worker, the actors, the voice director - which is basically like a movie director - the sound engineer, they all have an individual space and there’s even a box that sanitizes the scripts used by the voice actors.”

As you can see in this video on the newspaper La Repubblica's website, all voice actors have to respect distances and have their own personal tools. What’s more, the scripts are sanitized using an UV light (ultraviolet light, used to identify fake money), and both the engineers and the actors are separated by the glass walls. Usually plexiglass is used but it has terrible sound qualities and you can’t risk ruining the recording.

Up to the day of the interview in May, the PUMAIS DUE studio resumed working on the dubbing of Grey’s Anatomy and a few Amazon products, among many other productions.