[podfic commentary] for what it's worth
May. 24th, 2020 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oakleafficCommentary written for VoiceTeam 2020, week 4 challenge 'commentary'.
Link to the podfic here.
Motivations:
This was recorded for the VoiceTeam 2020 challenge 'FIRST', where we were tasked with creating a podfic for a fandom that hadn't previously had a podfic. I thought about my obscure fandoms and then read a bunch of King's Avatar fic before settling on for what it's worth. It has nice sections, a compelling AU and lots of emotional highs and lows - something that I’d enjoy reading.
Opening:
My approach to music for this podfic was pieces that were associated with video games. I looked for songs from games that Glory reminded me of, and I thought the guilds and raids were reminiscent of World of Warcraft (a game I have not played but have heard a lot about). The choice for A Call To Arms was for its grandiosity and its name - it made a lot of sense for pulling people in. It ended up not matching the summary perfectly, but I think the mood is about right.
This was one of the first times that I've ever read the summary as part of the story. I only started doing it for VoiceTeam, and it's something that I think I'll keep doing.
The story:
The raw recording for this fic was over an hour long. A lot of it was me checking the pronunciation of the character names - while I do speak Mandarin, I'm not great at it and I wanted to get the pronunciations just right. I realised afterwards that most of the characters Pinyin names were in the tags, so I didn't have to look them up after all.
The edit was somehow super painful. It took me three nights and ended up coming right down to the wire. I think part of it may have been due to edit fatigue - I’d only made four podfics over the course of five years before the start of the VoiceTeam event. But I’d made eight for the event so far at that point - and even though most of them were multivoice podfics where I didn’t have to do all the editing, I’d still edited my parts for them.
I flubbed two lines in the original recording, and then had to try to record audio to fill it in. Turns out it's a pain to try and re-equalise the audio. It's one of the reasons I favour podficcing things in the 20-30 minute range - long enough to feel substantial, but short enough I can do the recording in a single take. One of the lines worked out pretty well, but the other one is pretty obvious.
One thing I realised is a point of contention is whether or not breaths should be edited out. I've edited out most of mine for this podfic, and something I usually do. I think I breath a lot and it's pretty obtrusive.
For the section breaks, I used music from the live action TV. Partly because I didn’t have any other ideas, and partly because I liked the opening piano. It was hard to determine how long the breaks should be; I ended up settling for two phrases, and I think it works, but I certainly could have gone longer or shorter.
Oh, as a computer programmer, I would kill for Yu Wenzhou's talent in this story.
The hardest section to read was probably the Han Wenqing section with the commenters and deciding how to read that out. It's actually pretty funny, the podvid that my team created for a Witcher twitter fic ended up having a similiar reading technique which I adapted for this. I really, really enjoy epistolary stuff, and I'm a huge fan of being able to read lines from the point of view of a fan, because I recognise so many of the phrases, and it's a lot of fun to read. The ellipses were also a bit of a pain to work out, since "dot dot dot" didn't really make sense so me; I hope the hum fits in context and also conveys the right thought. I’m still not sure if the texting sound works in this section but I wanted to have a marker and I was rapidly running out of time so I just chose that really recognisable sound.
The line where Huang Shaotian and Wang Jiexi are drawing their avatars in Su Mucheng's section was such a tongue twister for me for some reason.
I love Qiao Yifan's character in the show. I love his section in this story. It's such chaos and it's just a lot of fun. The repeated "what the hell"s, Wei Chen's suggestions, Bao Rongxing's everything.
The end of Tang Rou and Bao Rongxing's sections are really cool in terms of both how it's written and also how much fun they are to read. Tang Rou has a lot of repetition that's really fun to read one after the other and to play with the emphasis. Bao Rongxing's one is just a really cool series of short events that leave the reader/listener wanting more, and it was cool to try and quietly read it.
The Ye Xiu section is really cool too. I had a lot of fun trying out different emphases on the official statements! The run-on sentence during the revelation of his talent also has a lot of range, which I really got to kind of geek out on and just experiment with. I really like how it turned out.
Where possible, I like to try and read character lines with their cadence, but that was hard to do for this story because of the change in language.
Ending:
I thought about looking for video game songs that were called “glory” because that would be ironic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any that fit in the time I had left before the week’s deadline. I really liked the name of this Halo song, and it sounded cool, so I picked it. It helps that Halo does have a multiplayer mode and was quite the popular game in its day so it was still pretty fitting for a story about eSports. The song starting up before "the end" is said is something I started doing with Sea and Snow earlier this year, and I really like the effect, so I've been doing it ever since.
Posting:
This was the first time that I posted using Internet Archive. I posted a podfilk the previous week, but one of my teammates made the actual post to Ao3. I did just use their audio player code but it turns out it's relatively easy. I think it's an easier and more stable way to post audio compared to Google Drive or SoundCloud. And it seems like it's better for browser/mobile compatibility. Something else I'll probably take forward into the future.
Link to the podfic here.
Motivations:
This was recorded for the VoiceTeam 2020 challenge 'FIRST', where we were tasked with creating a podfic for a fandom that hadn't previously had a podfic. I thought about my obscure fandoms and then read a bunch of King's Avatar fic before settling on for what it's worth. It has nice sections, a compelling AU and lots of emotional highs and lows - something that I’d enjoy reading.
Opening:
My approach to music for this podfic was pieces that were associated with video games. I looked for songs from games that Glory reminded me of, and I thought the guilds and raids were reminiscent of World of Warcraft (a game I have not played but have heard a lot about). The choice for A Call To Arms was for its grandiosity and its name - it made a lot of sense for pulling people in. It ended up not matching the summary perfectly, but I think the mood is about right.
This was one of the first times that I've ever read the summary as part of the story. I only started doing it for VoiceTeam, and it's something that I think I'll keep doing.
The story:
The raw recording for this fic was over an hour long. A lot of it was me checking the pronunciation of the character names - while I do speak Mandarin, I'm not great at it and I wanted to get the pronunciations just right. I realised afterwards that most of the characters Pinyin names were in the tags, so I didn't have to look them up after all.
The edit was somehow super painful. It took me three nights and ended up coming right down to the wire. I think part of it may have been due to edit fatigue - I’d only made four podfics over the course of five years before the start of the VoiceTeam event. But I’d made eight for the event so far at that point - and even though most of them were multivoice podfics where I didn’t have to do all the editing, I’d still edited my parts for them.
I flubbed two lines in the original recording, and then had to try to record audio to fill it in. Turns out it's a pain to try and re-equalise the audio. It's one of the reasons I favour podficcing things in the 20-30 minute range - long enough to feel substantial, but short enough I can do the recording in a single take. One of the lines worked out pretty well, but the other one is pretty obvious.
One thing I realised is a point of contention is whether or not breaths should be edited out. I've edited out most of mine for this podfic, and something I usually do. I think I breath a lot and it's pretty obtrusive.
For the section breaks, I used music from the live action TV. Partly because I didn’t have any other ideas, and partly because I liked the opening piano. It was hard to determine how long the breaks should be; I ended up settling for two phrases, and I think it works, but I certainly could have gone longer or shorter.
Oh, as a computer programmer, I would kill for Yu Wenzhou's talent in this story.
The hardest section to read was probably the Han Wenqing section with the commenters and deciding how to read that out. It's actually pretty funny, the podvid that my team created for a Witcher twitter fic ended up having a similiar reading technique which I adapted for this. I really, really enjoy epistolary stuff, and I'm a huge fan of being able to read lines from the point of view of a fan, because I recognise so many of the phrases, and it's a lot of fun to read. The ellipses were also a bit of a pain to work out, since "dot dot dot" didn't really make sense so me; I hope the hum fits in context and also conveys the right thought. I’m still not sure if the texting sound works in this section but I wanted to have a marker and I was rapidly running out of time so I just chose that really recognisable sound.
The line where Huang Shaotian and Wang Jiexi are drawing their avatars in Su Mucheng's section was such a tongue twister for me for some reason.
I love Qiao Yifan's character in the show. I love his section in this story. It's such chaos and it's just a lot of fun. The repeated "what the hell"s, Wei Chen's suggestions, Bao Rongxing's everything.
The end of Tang Rou and Bao Rongxing's sections are really cool in terms of both how it's written and also how much fun they are to read. Tang Rou has a lot of repetition that's really fun to read one after the other and to play with the emphasis. Bao Rongxing's one is just a really cool series of short events that leave the reader/listener wanting more, and it was cool to try and quietly read it.
The Ye Xiu section is really cool too. I had a lot of fun trying out different emphases on the official statements! The run-on sentence during the revelation of his talent also has a lot of range, which I really got to kind of geek out on and just experiment with. I really like how it turned out.
Where possible, I like to try and read character lines with their cadence, but that was hard to do for this story because of the change in language.
Ending:
I thought about looking for video game songs that were called “glory” because that would be ironic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any that fit in the time I had left before the week’s deadline. I really liked the name of this Halo song, and it sounded cool, so I picked it. It helps that Halo does have a multiplayer mode and was quite the popular game in its day so it was still pretty fitting for a story about eSports. The song starting up before "the end" is said is something I started doing with Sea and Snow earlier this year, and I really like the effect, so I've been doing it ever since.
Posting:
This was the first time that I posted using Internet Archive. I posted a podfilk the previous week, but one of my teammates made the actual post to Ao3. I did just use their audio player code but it turns out it's relatively easy. I think it's an easier and more stable way to post audio compared to Google Drive or SoundCloud. And it seems like it's better for browser/mobile compatibility. Something else I'll probably take forward into the future.