Mark Hadlow’s one of New Zealand’s most recognisable faces and voices, and he’s been ruling the stage, radio airwaves, and the big and small screen for years now. If that wasn’t enough, he also runs one of Christchurch’s most creative teams.

If you’ve ever wondered who one of the creative geniuses behind the TV2 Kidsfest is, well, Mark’s your man. We’re lucky enough to have him running our city council’s events team. The Kidsfest is on in the city right now and he says it’s the most successful ones they’ve ever run. He says kids are turning up in their droves to have fun these school holidays.

The great thing about him is that not only does he hold down this day job, but he keeps his finger in all the creative pies. He recently won a radio award for his highly characterised voice, he’s starting rehearsal for a professional Court Theatre production shortly, and, what’s more, he’s gearing himself up to shoot a film next month.

Let us say no more, and check out what he has to say as part of our Fresh Ideas:

The story dates back five years.. When Christchurch musician Amy Bowie was involved in a songwriting competition for television, she wrote and recorded a song inspired by Alice Sebold’s book, The Lovely Bones.

At that time, Amy wasn’t aware Peter Jackson had plans to turn that novel into a movie. Fast forward those five years, and the film was launched. With encouragement from friends, Amy decided to stick the song on YouTube. “Basically it was an experiment to see what would happen and if I could make any money out of it.”

Amy says she was embarrassed that people might think she was some “nutty YouTube girl” so she loaded it onto the video-sharing site anonymously under the username booksRgr8.

She didn’t have a proper video camera and was “way too embarrassed to ask my filmie friends for help”, so she went around every cemetery in Christchurch taking photographs of angel headstones and the like.

She also drew a few pictures, scanned them in and edited them together into what she calls “a stupid little video”. She titled it “The Lovely Bones Song” and away it went. To her surprise, people started asking for a download link so she started her own “Amie” (pseudonym) iTunes store – with most of the downloads and video views coming from the United States.

Thousands of people have now watched the video and it’s getting anywhere between 500-1000 hits per day, without really pushing the song at all.

Watch the beautiful, yet haunting, The Lovely Bones song here:

To download the song off iTunes, go to Amy’s iTune page – Amie

Wanting to capitalise on her success, Amy researched her followers on YouTube and found that most of them were ‘Twihards’ – often with usernames mentioning vampires and Twilight. So, she went and bought the book and discovered that one of the most mentioned songs in the book/movie was ‘Clair de Lune’ by Debussy. Amy did some further research and found that it was inspired by a poem by Paul Verlaine, which led to her decision to do a word-set adaptation/arrangement of the poem to Debussy’s melody – as she couldn’t find one to that particular melody. She has now loaded that one on YouTube and is working hard at promoting it on the sute through comments etc.

Amy finds the whole film-book-song-fan-video mix a fascinating study of culture and has even had someone make a fan-video of her song, “which I thought was way too weird and funny”.

Check out our interview with this interesting Christchurch muso as part of our Fresh Ideas:

Tandem’s voice agency is the largest in the South Island. This rich resource for clients sees Tandem offer voices for TV and radio commercials, DVDs and online videos.

The wide range of New Zealand and international voices are used by clients who market internationally into China, Japan, Australia, USA and Europe. Recently, Tandem was selected to provide the voice for the Flight of the Conchords radio commercials throughout the USA to promote their current tour. The voice was recorded at Tandem Studios and sent to the band’s agents in Los Angeles.

Choosing the right voice:

At Tandem we also run a unique educational course. It’s called The Voice School and we train aspiring voice-over artists in how to use their voice correctly and how to go about finding work in the industry. This course is also valuable for broadcasters and presenters in general. More info can be found on our sub site voiceschool.co.nz

Here’s a snippet from the last course we ran:

Tandem are experts when it comes to providing voice recordings. With over 90 voices in our agency, we have a voice for every need, and world class recording facilities to record, mix and master your production. Check out a full list of our voices here.

To enquire about being listed in our voice agency email us a MP3 sample of some of your work.

Tandem produces commercials for local and national clients, and every couple of months an international project pops up. But nothing as adventurous as the commercials we made for the Flight of the Conchords.

We had a call from Creative Sounds – a production house in Ireland – who were working with Another Planet Entertainment, a company based in the United States which was promoting a FOTC tour. Creative Sounds was charged with the role of making commercials for the tour so, naturally, they contacted Tandem – a New Zealand-based production company – for a Kiwi male voice artist.

The commercial was promoting “New Zealand’s fourth-most popular guitar bass digi-bongo acapella rap funk comedy folk duo – Flight Of The Conchords” tour in the US.

After putting forward a few voice samples, Toby Ricketts eventually won that job. Here’s the commercial:

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And while we’re in a Flight of the Conchords mood, check out one of their most-popular clips on YouTube. It’s had over 11-million hits.