Session 7 - 17-02-2011

Recording time!



The second of our recording sessions was booked in a proper recording studio. The quality of soundproofing and technology made the process both more professional and more enjoyable!


As an added novelty, we had a full compliment of cast! This meant that we could crack on to get all the recordings done today.

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To start the session, we all gathered in the recording studio to discuss any changes to the script or any problems people were having with lines or accents. My role today would be to work with the cast on the vocalization and characterisation of the script, mostly helping with accentuation, diction, pace and clarity.

The recording crew decided to record everything at least twice if possible to facilitate the editing process. This allowed me to give input from within the recording booth to try and improve each speech the second time around.

The headphone intercom system allowed for us to be in communication with the people on the sound desk, who would offer technical advice to optimize the recordings. The technical setup in the studio was a novelty to those who had not experienced it before, but ultimately it was very fit for the purpose of which it was designed.

Sitting in on the recordings was wonderful. To hear my script come off the page was such a brilliant feeling. I was also great to see the vocal talents within the group, especially from those who I had not heard much from over the course of the process.

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The recording desk where the technical magic happens!

Session 6 - 10-02-2011

Script drafted!

Its been an interesting process trying to shoehorn all the information into the text, laying clues for the participants, creating interesting and diverse characters, all whilst trying to keep it short enough to maintain audience engagement. After gaining feedback from Jill (researcher) and Shiona (playwright), the positive reaction was very encouraging. Between them, they offered some very useful criticism to act on when redrafting.

Armed with the new script, I arrived to find...3 students out of 7...

Another disappointing attendance, especially with all 3 students assigned to the graphic design being absent. As we are running to a tight schedule, the two weeks assigned for voice recordings we all we had. Luckily, we had one of the larger parts avaliable to record. (The Narrator)

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Session 5 - 03-02-2011

The session today started with a meeting. The main purposes were to address the issues regarding distribution of roles, to read through the parts of the script that I had completed to date, and most importantly to allow the group to express their views on my strengths and weaknesses in my role as a teacher.

This proved to be a useful process. The group were generally very positive about my skills in my teaching role, yet we also picked up a few issues that I need to address in the near future. This will hopefully allow me to improve my skills as the process continues!

After the meeting, Colette took over to do some work on characterisation, which I felt linked very well with the work we started last week.

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After a break for lunch, we had a chance to use the recording equipment. As the whole cast was not present, we worked with the voices that we had. We played around with the parts to give everyone a chance to do some recordings. As part of the testing, we looked at factors such as background noise, distance from microphones, breathing whilst recording etc.



We found that the microphones cancelled out much of the background hum in the room, making recordings feasible. We also highlighted issues with the deeper male voices with regards to the distance at which they should talk into the microphones. We also took a brief look at some of the effects that you could put on voices to change pitch and tune, which may be useful to turn a female voice into a more convincing male voice.



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To end the session, we had a brief meeting to decide provisional castings. Most people seemed to have a good idea about what part they would like to try. This made the process of assigning parts very simple. We may still have to change some parts if we have problems with illness or attendance etc.

With the parts assigned, we took a look at the narrative paths and locations that we tested on Sunday 30th Jan. I explained to the group about the options available to participants with regards to the routes they could choose. I showed them marked on a map as well as how they appear on a flowchart. By planning each route with specific directions, we found that all the routes were entirely possible!

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This session was very productive. I gained some great feedback on both myself and the script. Colette's session about characterisation fitted in very well to get the students thinking about how to give personalities and back stories to the characters in our piece. The session in the afternoon with the recording

All in all, a very good session! Back to writing the script then...

Session 4 - 27-01-2011

Today's session was due to be cut short due to an external production visiting the college. We were also plagued by illness, cutting the team from 7 down to just 3. After moving room, we only had just over 1 hour to work together!



Not to be put off, we made the best of the situation. Following on from the session on Monday, I set about finalising the order of the nodes, as well as assigning the chosen characters to the most appropriate locations. Thankfully, there was little trouble in matching people to locations. Every node seemed to have a perfect character to match it. This would help to make the script easier to write and more believable.

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In the session, after a recap from the session on Monday, I drew the narrative paths and character locations on a large poster. I explained to the group how I imagined the paths would be between the various locations, reassuring the group that they were all within comfortable walking distance of each other.

After we had agreed on the character locations, we began to discuss the characters themselves. Although they were all real people, little or nothing is known about their personalities. This gave us the freedom to assign them more creative and theartical characters, often giving them more extreme and focused character traits to fit the story.

I noticed that often people would all see a character in the same way. For example, everyone imagined the waitress Mary Alley to be a young, busty, ditsy barmaid. While this may seem like stereotyping, it proves very useful as part of the characterisation process. Often the stereotype is perfectly suited to the character, as long as the characters are still made believable.

At the end of the session, we looked briefly at possible assignment of roles, but with the characters likely to change and less than half the group present, we decided to end the session there. I then went away and typed up what we had agreed ready to send out to the other group members.

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Despite the poor attendance, I feel we made the best of the session. Having a smaller group does allow people to better express their thoughts and ideas. Now that we had agreed the order, I could start to structure the writing process for myself, knowing which nodes needed to be independent and which were experienced in a specific order.

On Sunday, I planned to visit Totnes to check if the routes were feasible, and if so, to plan out directions to program into the application.

Until then, its back to writing the script!

Session 3b - 24-01-2010

With the tremendous amount of information gathered from our last session, we had a lot of ideas to work with. As such, we decided that we would have another smaller session on Monday to begin to work towards assembling a story.

Despite the poor attendance for the session, I feel that we still made progress.

We discussed the different types of narrative style to decided which would be best for our story. This involved deciding on the point of view of the story:

1st Person "I walked into the pub..."
2nd Person "You are walking into a pub..."
3rd Person "She/He entered the the pub..."

We made a tentative decision to have a Narrator to give a general impression of the scene, a short history of the location, point out things of note etc.

We also decided that the story would be in the format of a journalist talking to witnesses via a short dialogue. We aim to keep the recordings fairly short so as not to overload the participants with information. We will invite them to take their own notes over the course of the audio tour.

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After a break, we looked at the order of events and how we might translate them into our story. As we decided to set the story from the point of view of a journalist who arrives in Totnes on the day of the final inquest, this meant that we didn't have to stick to placing events in chronological order. As an exercise, everyone was given a chance to map out an order of events as they saw it. While everyone came up with a different order, they all agreed of the format of a journalist speaking to witnesses. This gave me a great opportunity to plan out the story to best suit my proposed style of writing

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This session was very useful in defining a clear story in my head. With the help and input from the students, I began to pull my creative ideas together into a more focused writing plan. I now had the characters, the locations and the writing styles. I now felt happy to start writing!