OUAN505 - Recording the Script

On Tuesday the 2nd February, Callum and I thought it would be a good opportunity to book an induction for the sound booth so that we were free to record the narration for the script whenever we wanted to. We went to the resource department and asked if we could have our induction. Luckily for us, we were booked in for one at an hour later. We were shown down to the sound recording booth, and shown firstly where the lights and air con switches are. It was also mentioned that it's quite important to turn the air con off when recording because due to the sensitivity of the microphone the whirring of the air conditioning can be heard in the background and can lead to some bad audio in a sense because of this. The set up in the sound recording booth is very simple, consisting of some chairs, a Macbook pro for recording onto and a microphone stand with a condenser microphone at the end of it. Condenser microphones are ultimately the most common types of microphones that are used in places such as studios, for example. The reason for this is that they have a much wider frequency response, meaning the spectrum of sound pitches it can capture. As well as this, they generally have a louder output, but are a lot much more sensitive to loud sounds. To counter act the sensitivity of the microphone and to avoid picking up undesirable noises when recording voice a pop shield, or pop filter is used. A pop shield serves to reduce or get rid of all together the 'popping' sounds caused by the impact of fast moving air on the microphone during a session of recording speech or singing, if that's what it's being used for. Besides this practical use it also acts as a barrier to stop moisture from getting onto the microphone, which can be unhygienic. Something I learned about condenser microphones are that they are much more expensive than 'dynamic' microphones because of the reasons listed above. We were then shown some of the available software we could use for recording. Ultimately however, we chose to use audacity due to its simplicity in conjunction with how simple our recording process was. I've used audacity quite a lot from being at school and even more recently on projects from first year, so I feel comfortable using it, especially for something as straight forward as this. We asked some questions about the best way to record something similar to what we were doing because we wanted the best results possible. It was also quite interesting learning about the equipment and using the sound booth as a whole. We tested the headphones and the microphone to see how they operated and our induction was finished. In order to get some form of sound recorded, we booked a studio slot for the following day at 1pm as we were free in the afternoon. We booked the slot for around an hour, we didn't think we would need more time than that but it meant we were pressed to get something recorded.

When the time for our allocated slot arrived we signed the key for the sound booth out from the office and headed down to start recording the script. The overall set up was incredibly easy and it was quite nice doing something fun that I haven't done before. On the script we had split it into around six different sections, and so we recorded one at a time, reading from the notes. The method in which we went about recording was firstly, we tried a couple of different methods of reading the script. Quite a slow, deep tone and a more enthusiastic faster paced reading. We decided we liked the faster paced one more and it would fit into the time frame of two minutes better. Furthermore, there were several instances where we had to redo sections because of various slip ups reading lines or background noises for example. It took around an hour to record the whole thing to a standard where we thought we could use it at the very least to plan our animation around it and use it as a guide. After we had finished recording the various sections, I exported them and saved them to a USB drive along with the audacity file so we can go back and change things if we need to.