[Sussex] A SLUG Podcast - Another Way to Promote the Club

[Mark Harrison (Groups)]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 17:22 +0100, Steve Dobson wrote:

> either audio or audio and visual

/me comes out of the closet.

A fair amount of my income these days comes from royalties from being
the "actor/author" on some business audio training products.

I'd strongly recommend that we start with audio only.

I've been involved in a limited amount of video work (on both sides of
the camera), and to make it look noticeably better than "cheap home
video going to appear on Beadle if the dog falls over", there's an awful
lot of effort involved. My experience has been that you need a team of
at least half a dozen, and proper lighting rigs to make video non-nasty.
To do things professionally takes a HUGE crew - one two-minute short I
was in took a production crew of about a dozen people on site, plus the
"actors", and took a long day to record the material from enough angles
that it could be properly produced afterwards.

By comparison, the "real-time recording" of voice audio can be done very
well with a team of three - actor, producer, and engineer. At a push,
the producer can also act as the engineer at record time. The editing /
post-production can normally be done by a single person providing that
person understands the content well enough to edit properly.

The trick to getting a good-sounding flow is to NOT read a script. If
you are going to script it down to the last word, then you need it
committed to memory and well-rehearsed to make it sound right. I prefer
to work to slides of bullet points. In studio, I tend to work to about
one slide per 30 seconds, with 3-4 short points on each - that has the
advantage that the machine displaying can be a reasonably far distance
away from me (and thus the microphone), so there is no annoying
"clicking / typing noise" or even worse "rustling of paper."

In any case, the "actor" needs to be familiar with the material to stop
it sounding awful. You notice that I said "actor/author" above - it's
been my experience that informational audio is a lot more credible when
it's obviously the person who wrote the material presenting it. (Having
said that, I'd be willing to play a bit part, asking questions rather
than claiming to be any kind of technical guru.)

One final point - the use of "voices" is an area that's highly regulated
and unless contracts are signed, the "actors" have fairly strong rights
to demand royalties some while down the road, or even demand that their
voice is no longer used. I have a  "not for profit waiver of rights"
Plain English contract that I can dig out - probably worth getting
anyone involved to sign it and keeping copies. For the sake of 2 minutes
work up front, it can save a lot of nastiness down the line.

Regards,

Mark Harrison