Re-recording the dialogue

Date: Wednesday 17th January 2018

Time: 13:45-14:00
Personnel needed: Matthew Herriott (director/sound operator), Evie Brookes-Payne (Producer), Emma Hillier (Silvia Brown)
Props: none
Equipment: Microphone, Computer (audacity), Computer (script).

One of the suggestions for improvement had been that we needed to re-record Silvia Brown's voiceover dialogue (which previously had been blighted with a slight echo). In order to fix this we were going to need a microphone:

Even before starting the recording it was complicated trying to get this right because the microphone itself did not initially want to cooperate with the recording software that we had wanted to use (see picture below). In order to make this work, it was necessary to investigate how exactly to connect the two devices (because it wasn't as simple as just plugging Blue Snowball (the microphone) into the MacBook's USB socket.

Once we had been able to connect the two, we could begin to record. In the process of recording the dialogue I needed to consider a couple of things:
1) Recording the dialogue was not going to be as simple as if I were recording with a camera, because I had to open a new audacity window for each one rather than having something like a camera do something like that for me.
2) Unlike other work that I had previously done with audacity, if something went wrong when I was recording the sound file or editing it afterwards I could not simply get rid of it and re-import the file because this was the ONLY COPY that I had and would need to end up re-recording if something went drastically wrong (an event that all of us wanted to avoid at all costs).

In terms of actually getting it recorded, we were not working in the best possible conditions and could have done with finding a better location in which we could record because we needed to record without the backdrop of everything going on behind us. However, as the microphone was very much a localised device (it would only pick up sound that was within the immediate vicinity if it wasn't loud enough), for the most part we only needed to worry about sound sources that were really making a racket.

The recording setup:
Emma Hillier and Evie Brookes-Payne (left) with Microphone,
Mac with audacity recording software (right)