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QC Adventure Theatre! (Forum Radio Play!)

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pwhodges:

--- Quote from: Caleb on 28 Feb 2011, 06:32 ---It's always better to do a super short project first
--- End quote ---

I remarked above about the special influence of editing in a project like this where the actors are not together; I didn't make explicit that this also means that the amount  of editing will be increased hugely compared with doing the same thing with the actors together for each scene.  As with anything else, there is a trade-off between speed and quality of editing, but in any case I would urge that the first effort should be short - say no more than ten minutes.  That's still a lot of swaps between voices!  Tight writing can still get plenty of drama into ten minutes.

Jimor:
A lot of very good points (and more volunteers, yay!).

I agree on keeping this first one short. If we get it to work, then we're already way ahead of the game for a more ambitious project later.

Paul is absolutely right about the editing. I imagine it will be pretty involved, more like film editing than music editing, because adjusting the timing between lines and picking one reading of a line over another. One additional complication that may arise is the way a variety of equipment and software will be used for our source material. Much like films have to be "color balanced" to make all the shots match visually, there might have to be some "tone balancing" with EQ and reverb to make the people sound like they're at least vaguely in the same room.

Then there's a layer of sound effects, then music, which probably can't be finalized (though samples can be used as placeholders) until a final edit of the rest is done because of timing.

However. All that isn't really important unless the material is good enough to warrant the effort, and the project is fun enough where that kind of detail work isn't a chore for whoever has to do it.

And one thing that could go without saying, but I'll say it anyway, nobody is ever going to get yelled at for doing something "wrong", because if we set this up properly, that will be pretty much impossible. If somebody has to drop out because of life, we all understand that. Somebody else can always read the lines, somebody else can always do some music, or find sound effects, or do the editing, etc...

A couple of new posts to follow to cover other things.

Jimor:
Technical Matters for Consideration

On the technical side, I think we'll want 2 commonalities.

--First is an online site to store the raw and edited files. One account with a shared password among participants so that anybody who has to upload their voice/sound/music files can put them there, and so that editors and musicians can pull them down to do their part of the work. Even vocal talent may want to download the lines from any voice actor they're playing against in a scene to try to match up.

So any suggestions? I'm guessing we'd need about 2G of server space as a first approximation of what we could max out at (though more is always better). Generally, I think we can get away with 128-320kbs mp3 files for voice work if the original recording is clean enough. Please share any opinions about this, a lot of you are far more experienced with sound file issues.

--Second is that to share as much post-production work as possible, it's probably better to use a minimally capable freeware program that everybody can use and share files than to use the very best software possible if only one person has it. It's been a while since I've scouted for multitrack audio software (some video editing software would also work in a lot of cases), so I'm not immediately aware of the options.

Really all we need are 1) at least 8 tracks, 2) basic EQ/reverb/other effects, 3) ability to export to a variety of formats. If a particular sound or voice track needs any kind of specialty tweaking, we can have somebody use their software to do it then upload the altered file to be placed back in the freeware timeline. Likewise if we run out of track space, we can do a sub-mix file. And obviously, anybody doing music will probably be using their own recording/mixing software, but any finished product can then be place in the freeware for overall editing.

So suggestions on editing software and file hosting/backup site. Once those 2 items are in place, we're in a good position to make sure this all remains a collaborative effort.

pwhodges:
There's no contest on the software - Reaper.  Unlimited tracking, plenty of effects, available for Windows 32-bit and 64-bit and Mac, doesn't disable anything after the trial period - but anyone who is as into editing as this project will require will be happy to pay the very modest cost for some fearsomely capable software.

However, if editing is to be shared, I suspect that coordinating the sharing of a multitrack session would be beyond this forum.  We would do better to define sections - typically a scene, I guess, depending what the script looks like, to be assembled by a one person.  The issue of matching different contributors' offerings isn't a matter of their equipment (they'll provide a soundfile), but how to match acoustics and equalisation.  To this extent, it would be easier for one person to do it all, or perhaps for one person to match equalisations, and perhaps overlay minimal reverb to bring the acoustics closer, and then pass the "normalised" files to the editor to assemble, perhaps also adding more acoustic and sound effects to represent the location of each scene, with maybe a third person overlaying a music track on the edited dialogue.

While individual contributors could offer an MP3 to avoid stressing their upload capabilities, the editors should share their files as full waves, to avoid the degradation that repeated encoded inevitably brings.

I would offer hosting space on my own server, but the upload speed is a typical ADSL rate of 1.1 Mbps, which would get a bit tedious.  I could offer a login to a bucket in my Amazon S3 storage, but this is not free (though the cost would probably only reach a few dozen dollars over the whole project).  Actually, I could set up space on a server at work, which would be seriously fast, and no one would notice...

Jimor:
The Story

Some definitely trends in what people are saying. So lets see if we can push on to more specifics.

I think 2 points are settled. Keep it short, and a mix of comedy/drama. Funny was kind of a given with this crowd, but I think we all like the idea of still having a good story beneath the laughs.

Based on the input so far, I'm going to make a specific suggestion. Feel free to use this suggestion as a starting point to go wherever your muse takes you! Including the exact opposite direction. My main role at this point is to keep narrowing the discussion down until we finally have a reasonable consensus, but I'm always open to new and better ideas than anything I may suggest.

A historical comedy about pirates, where the central story is some kind of mystery, with some romance.

That basically describes Pirate of the Caribbean, but of course, we can do MUCH better than THAT. In 10-12 minutes. Our advantage is that with only sound as our medium, our visual FX budget is unlimited.  :wink:  


While people chime in on that. I'm thinking that for the actual procedure, is that once we decide exactly what kind of story, we have people submit quick outlines of their own vision of the story, discuss those a bit, then finalize that. Getting the actual script written is a different matter that I haven't quite figured out. We have several volunteers in that area, but it's always hard to tell whether collaboration would work, or if assigning it to one person would be better. I don't know yet.

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