Sound project 3 - Recording dialogue and some editing

Me and my partner met up after our seminar and gathered a few people to record different audio to a few different characters that Chris had come up with. For the most part we let our actors look at the character they were playing and improvise a few lines that they thought fitted the character in the given situation, if they were struggling we would quickly script a few lines for them to read. This method of recording characters was a good solution to our previous problem of a script being too narrow but recording actual bus passengers would be highly difficult, this method also allowed us to record in a quiet room and overlay the voice over the atmos track. As this was to be our first draft of the project, we had some actors play multiple actors which is something we will avoid in the final production. We decided that I would write the script for the final draft although I will only be semi scripting it as we decided it would seem more real if the actors were allowed to improvise some of their lines. By the end of the day we had managed to record the voices for all of the characters, Chris had recorded two the previous night, and we began the process of editing it.

Chris did most of the editing but I did give advice and suggestion during the process to help refine the project, one such suggestion was turning the volume of the atmos track up slightly because as it was the sound of the bus was lost behind the dialogue and as such the sense of place we had created was lost. The actual editing was fairly simple it mostly consisted of cutting the sound clips to just include the dialogue we wanted and positioning the files in the right order. Although the editing was limited and all we were creating was a first draft the end product sounded pretty good, our plan is to improve it by adding further sounds to support the thoughts in the characters’ heads, we also would prefer a more diverse range of actors to improve the realism of our piece. We’ve discussed some ideas and have come up with a list of possible sounds that we need to record to see how well they fit in the piece, we’ve also started talking about rerecording the dialogue to improve the quality and find other actors to fulfil the character roles where actors doubled up roles.