“Time Change” Revision and a New Video

I worked on my “Time Change” treatment, and I think I have finished a new video based on one of my writing exercises.

Time Change

I promised to revise my treatment for "Time Change" for the next script group session. I won’t be getting that done in time.

I started to make notes for the changes I want to make. Very quickly, it was obvious that the changes were more involved than I had thought. While I won't have the rewrite done, I plan to clean up my notes and share them.

There were two main problems I’ll need to resolve. The first problem is that the reason I had the protagonist going there didn't make sense. The second problem was that the reason the bad guys asked him to come had to have some link to their nefarious scheme. I had identified one scheme they had, which is the original idea behind the story, but I think they have to have something beyond that. I'm stuck for ideas.

"The Fortitude of the Adventurous Husband"

This was a writing exercise I did last November. I did a recording of it at the time but wanted to redo it as a video. I did a version of it using NAWMAL a couple weeks ago using the recording I did for the voices.

I was not happy with the woman’s voice that I did. For a while I’ve wanted to find an actor to do the female voices for my videos. A woman in the writer's group volunteered to record the woman's voice. She lives in another city, so we couldn’t meet in person to do it.

We decided to try recording her over ZOOM. That worked OK, despite some technical issues. The desktop computer I use for recording doesn’t have a video camera, so I had to look onto ZOOM with both my desktop and iPad. Being logged in on two devices was the primary challenge. I had to turn the speakers off on the desktop computer or else I got a lot of feedback. I used Audacity for the recording.

The actual recording went fairly smoothly. I had read some where that now a days when recording for voice work, they have the actor working on their own and have them do the same line several times with different readings each time. I often do this on my own recordings but is usually because I misread the lines I wrote.

One issue I was worried about was that the microphones on the computers are not the same quality as the one I use for my recording. When I listened to it afterwards, I could tell that we had recorded the two voices with different microphones. The two voices themselves are quite different, so I'm not sure if people who watch the video will notice.

I split the lines from the new recording and then replaced the recordings in the NAWMAL file. That went fairly quickly. I had to make a few timing adjustments so that the action and sound would match the older version. While I was at it, I made a few other changes in the NAWMAL file.

In NAWMAL I had 4 separate files for the four scenes in the video. I combined these using Premiere Pro. I have an old version from about 10 years ago. I added some sound effects, mostly footsteps. I also added an echo when they were in the cave. Then I added the titles and credits. I will leave it for a few days and then have another look and decide if I want to make more changes.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

"The Fortitude of the Adventurous Husband"

I posted my writing exercise "The Fortitude of the Adventurous Husband" this week.

An adventuresome Husband leads his wife on what is supposed to be a short walk in the evening.

·         https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-fortitude-of-the-adventuresome-husband

I wasn't totally happy with the result after I finished writing it. Mostly because I hadn’t felt very inspired by the idea. However, when I was recording the audio, I changed my mind about it. Certainly not the best thing I ever wrote, but still a worthy effort.

Video Versions

I still intend to turn these writing exercises into videos, but I haven't gotten very far with any of them.

I did start on them though. My first step was to split each line of dialogue into a separate file. When I put the audio files into NAWMAL, I need to have each line as a separate line. I have this done for the last three writing exercises.

I am still not happy with the Audacity plugin that I use to make my voice sound like a woman for the female characters. They don’t sound female to me. At least the voices sound different enough so that it character sound like different people.

I tried a different program to modify my voice, but I don't think it works any better. I read some posts about mimicking voices that said women's voices sound "breathier" than men's voices. I read descriptions of what this means, but I don't understand how to do that.

I talked to an actor about doing voices for me but haven’t followed up with her on that yet.

I have an account at one of those websites where you can create audio files using computer generated voices. The female character in “The Hysteria of the Uppity Guru” used a voice from that site. I'm reluctant to use that approach too often though. I think it would be OK for minor characters, but not for the main ones. Also, when I start to make longer videos, I will want to use actors for the voices, and I need to start building up experience working with actors to record voices.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog