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

[Steve Dobson]

Mark

On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 06:17:04PM +0100, Mark Harrison (Groups) wrote:
> 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.

I would agree that done wrong it can look tacky - but isn't that mostly
down to the light use.  Most modern artificial lights do not produce 
white light - which is what we need.  But are photographic bulbs that
expensive?  A light or two that produce good pure white light will
go a long way to give the video that professional look.  So will 
mounting the cameras on tripods.

One of the things we need to do is film against a neutral background - say
blue.  Most studios I've seen have single colour sets.  Filming in a room
with wallpaper produces a background image that fights for attention.
Someone in this group must have a someone in the group must have a nice
plain wall we can film in front of.

The other advantage of a plain wall should be that it compresses well.

> 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.

I agree, loss the video and the task becomes much simpler.  However, I
don't have any ideas that would work well with just audio.  I'm open 
to ideas, but we need an idea that doesn't need pictures to get the
message across.  How would you do a "How to install Knoppix" without
screen shots?

The BBC and others manage to get perfectly good video with a small
crew.  Yes we are going to have problems, yes we are going to make
mistakes - but isn't the learning from the the fun part?

> 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."

Yes, I agree.  Reading from a script - or just repeating lines will 
come out flat.  Actors train themselves to get the emotion into the
lines they say.

That is why I have talked about a story board.  It should detail the
shots we want to get - when we cut to screen shots, pictures, ...
and the points we want each scene to tell.  If we know when shooting
the "live action" when the cuts away are going to come we can then
stop if the actors have not hit all the bullet points that we feel
should be covered.

> 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.)

There is a strong argument for the geek knowing his stuff.  But I don't
think that needs to be a hard and fast one.  The correct sounding voice
will go much further than the guru with a squeaky voice.

> 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.

I have assumed that this video will be produced under a CC license.  You
might be right and make sure that everyone signs some document that states
that the content is to be licensed under CC, and what needs to happen if
we are approached for any reuse.

Steve

-- 
Stone's Law:
	One man's "simple" is another man's "huh?"
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