I worked on my “Time Change” treatment, and I think I have finished a new video based on one of my writing exercises.
Time Change
I promised to revise my treatment for “Time Change” for the next script group session. I won’t be getting that done in time.
I started to make notes for the changes I want to make. Very quickly, it was obvious that the changes were more involved than I had thought. While I won’t have the rewrite done, I plan to clean up my notes and share them.
There were two main problems I’ll need to resolve. The first problem is that the reason I had the protagonist going there didn’t make sense. The second problem was that the reason the bad guys asked him to come had to have some link to their nefarious scheme. I had identified one scheme they had, which is the original idea behind the story, but I think they have to have something beyond that. I’m stuck for ideas.
“The Fortitude of the Adventurous Husband”
This was a writing exercise I did last November. I did a recording of it at the time but wanted to redo it as a video. I did a version of it using NAWMAL a couple weeks ago using the recording I did for the voices.
I was not happy with the woman’s voice that I did. For a while I’ve wanted to find an actor to do the female voices for my videos. A woman in the writer’s group volunteered to record the woman’s voice. She lives in another city, so we couldn’t meet in person to do it.
We decided to try recording her over ZOOM. That worked OK, despite some technical issues. The desktop computer I use for recording doesn’t have a video camera, so I had to look onto ZOOM with both my desktop and iPad. Being logged in on two devices was the primary challenge. I had to turn the speakers off on the desktop computer or else I got a lot of feedback. I used Audacity for the recording.
The actual recording went fairly smoothly. I had read some where that now a days when recording for voice work, they have the actor working on their own and have them do the same line several times with different readings each time. I often do this on my own recordings but is usually because I misread the lines I wrote.
One issue I was worried about was that the microphones on the computers are not the same quality as the one I use for my recording. When I listened to it afterwards, I could tell that we had recorded the two voices with different microphones. The two voices themselves are quite different, so I’m not sure if people who watch the video will notice.
I split the lines from the new recording and then replaced the recordings in the NAWMAL file. That went fairly quickly. I had to make a few timing adjustments so that the action and sound would match the older version. While I was at it, I made a few other changes in the NAWMAL file.
In NAWMAL I had 4 separate files for the four scenes in the video. I combined these using Premiere Pro. I have an old version from about 10 years ago. I added some sound effects, mostly footsteps. I also added an echo when they were in the cave. Then I added the titles and credits. I will leave it for a few days and then have another look and decide if I want to make more changes.