Mark Simon discusses working with actors.

I love voice-over recording sessions. Working with great actors is a joy. It is so much fun to hear your characters coming to life and evolving.

Great actors make scripts better. Every time I run a table-read, the script gets better. And then when actors get in the booth and get into character, magic happens. Whether it's a change of a single word, the intonations of a phrase or a whole new line of dialogue, actors can make their characters more believable.

Being in a studio together allows a close working relationship to make the project as good as possible.

The one thing I don't like is when I don't have that closeness while working with actors. Long distance directing has been getting easier over the years, but there is nothing like being together.

But, I've come up with a way to make long-distance directing easier.

Watching the way an actor moves during a recording session allows me as a director to see what they are thinking. Changing their stance, motion or facial expression can make a huge difference in the way a line sounds.

Most animation directors will tell you that they often direct voice sessions long distance. Most voice-over actors are in L.A. and New York. No matter where you are, you are likely to need actors in one, or both, of those cities.

Stephen Chiodo, director and co-founder of Chiodo Bros. (Killer Clowns from Outer Space, Elf, Team America) has also never used video in a long-distance audio recording session. "It's a great idea. It would be cool to have video in a VO session."

It would cost far too much and take too much time to make all the actors travel to where the director is and directors often don't have the time to travel to the actors either.

Most sound recording studios allow us to dial directly into a booth, via ISDN or regular phone lines, and we can listen to and give direction to the actors and the recording engineers during the session.

I recently directed a number of voice-over actors in New York from my office in Orlando for the pilot Enchanted Thyme. We used New York's Hyperbolic Audio and I was able to dial directly into the booth to talk with my actors.

However, I really wanted to be able to see my actors act. I wanted to get to know them to make the sessions easier and more fun.

I asked Andy Roth, our casting director, to set up a computer camera with Skype in the recording studio. Andy has a Skype account and a built-in camera in his laptop. He simply set up his laptop on a chair outside the booth so I could see the actors through the glass window.

Before each session the actors and I spent a few minutes getting to know each other and discussing their characters. The video feed made it feel like we were there together.

During the session, I would watch how they moved and they could see my reaction for that ever-important feedback which actors need.

I'm sure the actors felt the sessions were a little like being in an episode of Futurama with my disembodied head sitting on a chair watching them.

After the sessions, the actors all said that although long-distance directing is common, this was the first time they ever had a video feed in a recording session.