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Narrator Notes, Bullet Journal style

4/2/2016

A friend very recently introduced me to the Bullet Journal method, originated by Ryder Carroll. It is a flexible way of keeping track of life, prioritising and tracking everything from work projects and yearly goals to fitting in household tasks. A quick Google sees it credited for 'curing' "Idea Overload Syndrome", helping people with ADHD or simply lots to do, and it has spawned a number of videos and Pinterest boards.

At its simplest, it's really a flexible 'to do' list, all in one place. Some people make it into something more creative, colourful and expressive. It's a personal thing, which probably explains its rise in popularity, and so it's possible to adapt it to audio drama management.

Audio books - often 8-10 hours long plus, as Karen Commins mentions on her very informative blog, will take six times that many hours as a conservative estimate to produce. So you will be dealing with projects of around 60 hours.
That may take a lot of accurate planning to fit into your daily schedule.

I have always used very detailed breakdowns of the process in tables, colouring in progress as I go, alongside a calendar schedule, all online.
The bullet journal appealed to me in that it is a visual approach, but also a handwritten one. There is a fascinating article here by Lauren E (Cugliotta) Proctor, citing many pieces of research suggesting that "handwriting may play a role in superior synthesis and retention of complex ideas."

Whatever the reasons, I personally find physically ticking a box or scrawling a quick note can be satisfying.
So, I set about making a Bullet Journal style audio book production overview. In line with the movement, it's freehand rather than drawn up digitally. Many Bullet-journal creators seem to draw new designs for every project, but frankly it's less time-consuming to do it once and scan it.

Here is the page I came up with, which contains basic information and progress boxes, so that it's quick to fill in, and it fits neatly into an A5 size notebook. It may be worth doing a longer, more detailed character breakdown, perhaps with any pronunciation queries for the rights holder (if necessary). But this just allows for a very immediate overview of the state of progress and the number of hours' work remaining.

If you're also wooed by this approach, then have fun designing your own, personalised work schedule!

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What Makes Voice Acting Performance Different?

25/8/2014

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With thanks to Leslie McMurtry

At first glance, voice acting may seem less complicated than 'full body acting' for stage or screen. After all, a voice actor doesn't have to worry about the immediate effect of their physical actions or physical appearance on the audience. However, acting is communication in action, and according to research by Albert Mehrabian, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA, speech only accounts for 45% of communication.
This breaks down as only 7% of communication being words, with tone of voice being 38%.

Voice acting is not simply stage/screen acting with the physical removed. As an experiment, listen to an extract from an unfamiliar movie with your eyes shut. The actors will be using their voices to create character, but in harmony with their physical movements and their surroundings, so it will usually sound like a movie with the picture part missing. Listen to a similar dialogue in a radio play, and the acting should sound 'complete', so that the audience is not distracted by the lack of visuals.

That's not to say that voice actors neglect their physicality. Posture, gestures and facial expressions all affect and change the sound of the voice. A smile will carry over the airwaves, as will tension or energy.

While the limitations of audio can actually be liberating, they can be a challenge. The voice alone has to do the job of all the other senses, so voice actors learn to use it rather like an instrument. The actor is left only with the words, noises (and the rhythm and space within them) with which to express meaning and emotion, but also accent (and related background nationality or ethnicity; age; class; implied physique; speech impediments, etc). Here are some ways in which they may do that:

Vocal Tone
To get different tone, the actor can use different parts of their body to resonate the sound, like head, nose, chest, etc. to make the voice sound reedier, more nasal, broader and stronger (as it goes downwards).

Accent
To find accent, they will usually study the accent from authentic examples (found on Youtube, or on specialist sites such as the fantastic IDEA one. They can practice the shape of the mouth and throat and, eventually, be able to apply those sounds to a script.

Interpretation and Emphasis
Note that Mehrabian's studies showed that tone of voice is responsible for well over a third of communication. Meaning leads to a lot of experimentation and practice. Audio scripts typically have few directions if any, and a sentence like "What are you doing?" has 4 different interpretations to start with, simply by emphasising a different word. Add an emotion, or several and all the takes mount up.

Emotion
Emotion is surprising - as mentioned previously, a smile does travel extraordinarily well over the airwaves, and if the actor is tired, it's quite frightening how the microphone can pick that up. In Old Time Radio, emotions tended to be almost as intense as in stage performances. Nowadays, the general trend is much more for 'Realism', so listeners' ears are tuned in to hear subtle emotional performances.

Of course, actors can do all of the above in a stage play, as well as a whole lot of physical exercises to find posture, movement and so on, but the listeners' focus on the voice alone and the intimacy and sheer sensitivity of a microphone make accuracy and control essential.

Technical Technique
Voice actors also have to take the microphone's sensitivity and quirks into consideration when breathing, making louder noises, positioning themselves (and not accidentally shifting about while speaking). The microphone is an extension of their body and voice, in a way, and so they need to master microphone technique to avoid puffs or clattering about.

Sounding Natural
For satellite audio drama, actors may be cast around the globe. They record several takes of their lines in home studios and then send them back to the mixer/producer. This may happen in screen acting, too, and actors need to work hard on sounding as involved with their imaginary fellow actors as possible.
The mixer can help in treating the lines to make them sound as if they are recorded in the same size/shape space, but it is the actors who can make it truly believable.

My own experience in mixing satellite audio soon taught me that the actors who sounded most natural in their conversation, when mixed in with another characters' lines, were ones who said the words in the same way: they all delivered any dialogue lines as if they were unfinished.
So instead of the listener almost hearing the deadening crash of the question mark in:
"Lovely to see you! So how are you?" the actor would -sometimes almost imperceptibly- continue. It might just be a short intake of breath; or a tiny, abstract vocal sound; or a very slight elongation of the last word in anticipation of the answer. Or occasionally, they would actually begin the first sound of a new sentence.

When they were then placed in a conversation, those extra bits would ride gently under the other person's response and it would compensate considerably for the conversation being recorded separately.

To do this, the voice actor imagines themselves really having that conversation. Perhaps they improvise with it in their head (and often in takes, as well - which is always an extra blessing for the mixer). I personally found that reading and 'hearing' the other characters' voices responding to the lines helped in getting into that mode.

So all in all, voice acting is a slightly specialised form of acting, with the detail that such an intimate medium brings. The aim for all voice actors is to gain control over a wide range of aspects of their voice, in order to express outwardly the character they are feeling from within. Like all creative processes, there are large elements of craft mixed with imagination and experimentation until they find the voice that fits.

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Aspects of Audio Drama Done Well #1 Dramatic Irony Done Well

18/11/2012

2 Comments

Dramatic Irony Done Well

Cornucopia Radio Podcasts no.36 The Tight Ann Hic
written and Produced by Chris Bellamy. Edited by Peter Beeston.
Aural Stage Sudios: Dialed In - Straw Into Gold written by Perry Whittle

These short plays are lovely examples of the humour that can be derived when the audience knows more about the situation than the characters – or more about the characters than they, themselves, do. Done extremely well in these two plays, the listener can predict the characters’ fates or foibles and laugh almost before the punch-line.

In The Tight Ann Hic the writer does it by starting with a tale from history where, as quoted from the website:
“Declan Deck has invented something which he feels will change the very nature of what we consider standing and what we consider sitting. He calls it an easy-to-erect-and-collapse-one-size-fits-all-canvas-covered-chair (although he’s flexible on future name changes). He thinks that perhaps a soon-to-be-launched, metal-clad, yet unsinkable boat (featuring four funnels, five decks & one lifeboat), will be the perfect place to demonstrate his new sessio-esque device. But somewhere, out in the Mid-Atlantic, sits a lonely and tone-deaf iceberg who has a very different idea… “

What follows is a fun twist on events around that familiar background with invented characters who are also funny in their own right.

In Straw into Gold it is one of the main characters who is familiar, and the joy here is seeing that personality in an unusual situation.
“A princess (Linda Mason) contacts a ghostwriter (Matthew J Boudreau) known for his unusual success to write her story. However, the cost of success may be a little too high for her liking.”
Again, a fair part of the humour comes from agreeing with the writer – of course the character would say that, and in seeing how that affects the outcome.

Dramatic Irony is only one aspect of these plays and only one part of their fun, but it is a real benefit of writing a spin on something/someone from history, mythology or popular literature. Other benefits can be the immediacy with which the audience can connect with the play, and the reduced need for exposition. It can be enormous fun for writer and listener alike as the writer then takes that start into brand new territory, just as done in these two short plays.

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Aspects of Audio Drama Done Well

18/11/2012

1 Comment

I enjoy listening to a range of audio drama and, like everyone, have personal opinions on individual shows and what makes good audio. Much of the audio drama today is created by passionate people in their free time and is free of charge for listeners to download.

This is one of the greatest qualities of modern Internet audio drama, in my opinion. It not only makes drama accessible to anyone with an internet connection who wants to listen, it makes it accessible to anyone with a computer, microphone, an internet connection and the time and energy to make audio drama. They are not inhibited by their background, their location, by any need to make commercial art - and for a very small cost they can transport listeners anywhere, through the magic of the airwaves, or should that be airwavs?

As someone also enthusiastic about making audio, there's almost always a moment, or many, listening to any good audio drama where you say 'Wow, now that's how to do A,B or C - or all of them."

And that's what gave me the idea to share some of those 'wow' moments.

I've never been into reviewing. I'd rather be doing. These are not reviews. These are simply mini-articles, with links, on an aspect of Audio Drama that I think is really well done and so want to rip off shamelessly one day.

Here's the thing - and I apologise in advance - I will be writing these as and when they happen naturally, which is likely to be one every few months. I can't take requests to listen to shows or to mention particular shows. They will be mercifully short. They will also be my opinion only – just notes on what I think really worked, as a listener.

What I do hope is they might be useful in some way to other people just like me: also trying to improve their understanding of the best of audio drama. And, my goodness me, there's a lot of it out there to learn from and emulate now.

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Author

I've been working on audio projects for several years now as an actor, writer and audio mixer. Exploring the audioverse and reporting back a little here.

Narrator Notes, Bullet Journal style

What Makes Voice Acting Performance Different?

Aspects of Audio Drama Done Well #1 Dramatic Irony Done Well

Dramatic Irony Done Well

Aspects of Audio Drama Done Well

Author

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Narrator Notes, Bullet Journal style﻿

What Makes Voice Acting Performance Different?

Aspects of Audio Drama Done Well #1 Dramatic Irony Done Well

Dramatic Irony Done Well

Aspects of Audio Drama Done Well

Author

Archives

Categories

Narrator Notes, Bullet Journal style