Audio Book Recordathon!

I've been busy for the last four days doing some recordings for an audio book: one of currently ten that I'm to be voicing. I was initially excited about all of this... mainly as I was getting paid and I need some financial help. Now, it's more of a "meh" and boredom... as well as realizing that as this is a larger project I shouldn't have charged my small project rate.

The reason for this simply comes from the fact that I'm usually more of a character actor, I like doing characters, different voices, etc. Reading a book is... reading a book. Sure I could do voices, but keeping the voices consistent and not sounding too out of place would be a little hard. Also, there's female characters and I defiantly can't do those proper. Maybe something Monty Python-ish, but this is a serious espionage story.

Though I believe it's not just that... it's because it's a book. Mostly everything I'm used to doing is a line-by-line ordeal, but I've occasionally had things involving pages, but at most they were 50 pages.

Lines are usually short, just a couple of sentences. If you screw up, you can usually go back and redo it all. As well as that, if you are like me, you will send a couple of takes of a line to your "boss" so they can have a picking of which they liked the most. It saves you and their time.

Anything with long readings, say a chapter in a book, you have to change that up. Redoing the entire recording because of a screw-up is CRAZY. When a chapter can last almost 40 minutes, going back to the beginning of the chapter every time is just a waste of time. Even going back to the start of a page can waste a bit of time; especially if there's a little area that you have issues with constantly and you finally passed it.

I quickly learned that if I got past a paragraph and screwed up in the next, that I needed to start in the second paragraph; unless, that is, that I felt I could have done something better in the previous one. Time is key for me. I have ten days (more or less, it is the holidays) to complete 340 pages and getting my 35 page per day quota and that often takes about 3-4 hours of my time. Not the largest amount of time by any stretch of the imagination, but when you have other things to do or would like to do (e.g. do other voice overs or do an animation) it helps to limit what else you can do.

I would say that this is an experience... and that I defiantly need to figure out what to do about larger projects if they come my way; especially through the site I've been using. Small projects can be completed in a day or two, but when it's something this big, takes days, and lots of hours (not the recording time, but actual labor time): it isn't the same thing nor should be considered so.