Today the writers and I booked out a room and a Mini-Marantz from the college library in order to improvise our characters and therefore develop them further whilst also allowing us to become more familiar with the characters at hand. We decided to record this for official documentation to use when later writing research/production documents on the subject – therefore providing evidence that this meeting happened and to also reflect upon in the future - to evaluate the successfulness of this mini-project.
We decided to book out a Mini-Marantz because we were all inducted with it and therefore was more familiar than other recording equipment available. We also decided against the recording studio due to the restraints that it issued, compared to the ease and portability of the Marantz; choosing the library’s meeting room due to location, quietness, and mild sound proofing.
After setting up the necessary procedures, we wrote a list of possible questions to ask our characters. This allowed us to better prepare each character’s response as well as add a sense of coherence between each recording without sounding too forced/structured. In addition, we also decided to add a dedicated space for some improvisation – If we hadn’t so far in the recording – to push us to develop our character and get a better feel for them. This was a good precaution due to us stumbling a couple of times when trying to think of questions, then all we had to do was revert to the questions written down. This was also a good fall back for those of us that weren’t comfortable being recorded or with the character at hand because it provided a sense of comfort and an improvisational aid, with the questions being a mix of open and closed – therefore allowing varying degrees of possible improvisation. If I were to attempt this again in the future, I would write a similar list due to how successful it was with aiding our recordings.
After deciding what questions to ask, we then formed a list of who is voicing what character and when. Sticking to our normal divisions, each writer took the characters they had developed previously so that they could develop them further and allow the rest of the team to see what style each character is trying to be presented as. Though originally planned like the picture above, a couple of characters were swapped/given to different members of the team due to personal reasons. The concept of this list was a very good idea as it gave each writer a chance to prepare for their character before they had to record them – therefore a more accurate representation of that character was recorded - however, in practicality, this list wasn’t very successful due to the swaps in characters. Personally, I feel that the benefits of swapping characters outweighed the cons of not sticking to the list because of the improvisation produced from them. An example being Polo; despite originally being Jas’ character, I felt more comfortable acting him out than Jas did, therefore I produced Polo and the group agreed that my interpretation was parallel to his concept aspirations.
Overall, there was only one failure from today’s session; we didn’t have enough time to record all of the side characters planned, therefore we exported what recordings we had and decided to book again for the following week. For booking next week’s session I will keep in mind how long it took to record today's characters and try to book the room/equipment accordingly as to prevent this from happening next week too.
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