Slashdot Mirror
Internet-Created Free Audio Dramas?
fraser_joat asks: "The other day I finally took the time to watch Starship Exeter, previously reported on Slashdot. Coincidentally, I also revisited the BBC's excellent radio adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, following the hype caused by the recent movies.
The two of these got me thinking: while _Exeter_ was clearly a huge effort, it looks like they had a lot of fun making it. In many ways they are scratching the same sort of itch that generates free software. So what about audio drama? The technology needed to produce it is freely available, things like Ardour and Csound. So is it possible to produce an audio drama based on free texts such as those from Project Gutenberg in a distributed fashion, with contributers from all across the Net, just like with software? Would they even be useful as an introduction to classic fiction or just as pure entertainment?"
It would need to be a real community effort - I fancy that I could produce a passable script adaptation of a book and help with the audio production and sound effects, but I'm no actor, nor do I have equipment at home that even approaches what would be required. What about it?"
"While the technology exists to cut a play together, I see several possible problems:
- High-quality audio recording equipment is expensive, and homes are not ideal environments. Can source material of sufficiently good quality be generated without professional facilities?
- Since the actors could be widely separated, can they act in isolation in a sufficiently convincing manner that they can be cut together later, in the same way that film actors must pretend that the special effects exist during shooting?
- Are there good (royalty-)free sound effect libraries available?
It would need to be a real community effort - I fancy that I could produce a passable script adaptation of a book and help with the audio production and sound effects, but I'm no actor, nor do I have equipment at home that even approaches what would be required. What about it?"
Aren't cartoons done in a segmented fashion? You don't get all of the actors in one room. Each one records there segment and then everything is spliced later on. Actually, there is no reason that you couldn't do exactly like you suggest and find somebody who is willing to do some low end computer animation.
http://www.nabiki.com/radioplay/
Radio plays made by people who write anime fanfiction. Yes, this is the *pinnacle* of geekdom!
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Because I really want to see poorly coreographed lightsaber duels with AfterEffects glow slapped on top.
Set to a bastard child combo of John Williams and Fatboy Slim and you've got a hit! You're an internet movie star, baby!
Introducing young folks to the classics is as old as, well, Classic Comics.
Just remember that internet radio can to terribly, terribly wrong.
my other penis is a vagina
A few years ago, I ran into an audio series on the Internet, although it was originally on NPR Playhouse. Apparently it was one of there most popular series of all time. Its a wonderful, campy radio drama. I wish these guys would do more. Highly worth checking out.
o we en99/hayward_sanitarium/hayward.html
Check on Google, but ther RA files can be found here:
http://www.cincinnatisoftball.com/specials/hall
This might be just the sort of thing to fill a little niche in the consumer marketplace. I personally enjoy audio dramas, as well as a lot of spoken-word work, and it's hard to find in the commercial marketplace. Presumably this is because there is insufficient demand for it to catch the eye of big distributors. I, for one, would welcome this. Might even pay a buck or two for it.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
take away the thrill of being on stage, and I'm not sure how much merit there is to producing "Spartacus meets Elvis" for display in a browser window
Perhaps a less ambitious and more realistic starting point would be to produce "books on tape" of some of the Project Gutenberg works. One person could produce a work with minimal effort and no sound effects.
Oh, you can find StoneTrek here, to save some bandwidth on the home site.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I watched Exeter, and it was a good effort. In fact, I think its safe to say that it was a pretty darn good effort, and that from a prop and production sense, it was very similar to the original Star Trek.
But, SOMETHING was missing, and I don't know what it is. Maybe it was the director, perhaps it was the acting. I mean, could Bill, Leanord and DeForrest have made it better, with everything else the same?
Voice actors have the same issue. It's very difficult to be convincing over audio when all you have is some pages and are locked into a silent recording booth.
My favorite audio play is "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". The production on this CD is absolutely amazing, from the actors, the sounds, the music, everything. Simply incredible. (it's funny as hell too)
So, while we may have the technical means to produce "cheap audio", there's still a human factor involved that is difficult to quantify.
There's been a few specially written audio dramas written for Doctor Who and featured on BBC's Cult site (can't recall URL presently), which IIRC have used some of the original actors when possible as well as some reasonably famous celebrities for additional voices.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I'm really sorry to break it to all the geeks here BUT you do actually need to act to do Radio plays. It can be much harder to convey feeling when all you have is a voice.
People who can act have a skill, just like coders. And lets face it...
No one has ever said that communication is the strongest skill that a geek ever had.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
that that pretty much describes most amateur produced *audio* drama.
Pitiful, idn'it?
KFG
Could it be matched by a radio drama of a webcomic that sometimes parodies anime?
Tsunami Channel Radio Drama (current location) (future location)
For those interested, I happen to play the lead male character of Experimental Comic Kotone (Onii-chan) in the scripts and I'm also planning on aiding design of part of the Radio Drama site when relocated. There is a sample script up on the current site for those interested.
More and more universities are offering their students high quality audio equipment for free use. One place I know of is Johns Hopkins, where a number of people I know have produced professional sounding recordings simply by taking a quick class in how to use the equipment offered by the university.
Possibly other places, like libraries might do the same for out of school people. The equipment's there, there just needs to be the time and the money.
I don't know about the legal issues with use, though, such as students using the equipment to bootleg concerts, etc. Other issues might include people renting the equipment to make "home videos".
There's plenty of free professional-grade stuff at Seeing Ear Theatre.
Scifi.com occasionally even throws in some classic radio stuff, but the best source for "X Minus One" (Bradbury, Dick, Zelazny, etc.) is Old-Time Radio mp3 trees where you trade CD-R's through the mail.
The example you gave, BBC's dramatization of Lord of the Rings is very poor compared to the performance of Rob Inglis in his unabridged "reading" of those books.
This is even more apparent with the American dramatizations of LotR's or for the BBC dramatization of The Hobbit vs. Inglis' performance.
The most difficulty is in the abridgement -- especially for an amateur cast -- the author doing the shortening had better be good.
However, a dramatic reading could be done by a single person with modern technology and you wouldn't have the problems of remote communications you mentioned.
Internet radio dramas are a great idea. How else will the visually impaired get to enjoy goatse.cx?
Trolling is a art,
Consider something like the the bar with the aliens in "Star Wars". In an audio drama, all you have to do is have a few words by the narrator (something about a typical seedy spaceport dive, with a band of aliens playing exotic instruments), and then some simple sound effects, and the listener gets an image of the place.
Not "the" image...but "an" image...which is better, because everyone gets the image of the perfect seedy spaceport dive for them.
In a movie, all we get is the director's image...and unless they spend a lot on costumes and effects, it's a cheesy image at that.
When you don't have to spend most of your budget on effects, you can spend more on story. Many classic SF stories that we'll probably never seen done well on the screen were done in the 50's on radio.
Finally, audio works great in the car.
Even if it's not going to generate much excitement here (on /.). It's a small niche but I'm sure there are people for whom this could be the ideal creativity outlet. The original poster should have created a web site first, and post the URL so that those interested could have a permanent point of contact to share information and brew projects.
Has anyone got a URL for the BBC's radio play version of LOTR?
I make software that turns collections of MP3 files into streaming web sites. I've got lots of bands, but I've recently been looking for "spoken word" type content - dramas would be SO cool! If at all interested, check out Andromeda and get in touch! -Scott
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I think it falls into the catagory of "why bother?"
If you've got a net everything starts to look like a net problem I guess. I've never known any physical local that suffered a shortage of dramatic wannabes. I know towns with populations in the hundreds that have *more* than one community theater.
While the net would be an ideal medium for *distributing* such works just putting a notice on a college bulliten board should turn up more actors than you need to stage the complete works of Shakepeare without repeating anybody.
Of course the college is likely to bust you for distributing those "illegal" mp3 files, but that's a different issue.
KFG
Spielburg got into filmmaking by going out with his friends and having them run at each other with sticks for guns.
Various mappers got picked up by gaming houses for creating maps for games like Quake.
The Counterstrike people got their commercial start by making a free mod for Half-Life.
Visibility is a good thing. Given the fact that voice acting is slowly coming into demand again (see the rise of Anime in the US), an outlet for the 'amateurs' is a good thing.
Most dubs, for example, suck. I'm not talking about the idiocies they throw in from mistranslation, I'm talking about the actual voices. Being an actor in a movie doesn't make you a good voice actor, and vice versa. Voice acting *is* harder - you don't have facial and bodily expressions to help you out.
Thus, if we get audio dramas and crap to be mildly popular, it gives amateurs a place to work/show off their talent, and in the future, with any luck, dubbing on animated movies won't suck nearly as much.
I've thought about it. The tech side is easy, art side a bit more challenging (getting people who can really do radio well -- they may be actors, though some writers have a better gift/understanding of spoken word), BUT who pays for the bandwidth? If you're paying by the GB, even a moderately popular project could be very expensive.
Possibly the thing that was missing here was familiarity with establised characters.
If you were to watch an original series episode for the first time, especially now, you'd probably firstly notice how 'ham' the acting is.
Having compared an original episode with 'Exeter', I'd tend to conclude that it doesn't feel quite the same because I'm not familiar with the new characters. The acting however is just as ham.
But what if there were a few more Exeter episodes? Would that make all the difference?
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I think this is a great idea and with the right software support, it could create a new form of mass artistic collaboration. I would love to participate. FYI, XM Radio has two channels devoted to radio drama. XM163 has Sonic Theater, which does modern serialized radio plays and dramatic readings of classic fiction, e.g., things you might find in Guttenberg. Some of it's really quite good. XM164 is classic Old Time Radio, most of which I happen to love. These two channels are a large part of the reason I got XM.
It's sounding an awful lot like a Little Rascals or Mickey Rooney Judy Garland film:
"I can sing!"
"I can make decorations!"
"And I can rip it to mp3!"
The problem is you generally need actors with some training to provide the voices. Don't assume that it's "just talking".
The best example of not heeding this warning can be seen in those computer games (thankfully most places do everything professionally now) where it's obvious that the programmer's friends did the voices. It sounds horrible.
Back in the eighties I had a lot of friends who produced public cable access TV shows. You can borrow the cameras and use the studios and editing facilities. Depends on the city, but in Portland Oregon all you had to pay for was tape. Most of the shows were on the level of two people sitting in the studio with a fake potted plant between them. But there were some scripted stories shot on location with local actors, or at least acting students. Very amateurish but occasionally interesting and sometimes actually good.
My point is that people who want to do these things are already doing them. There's nothing holding back anybody from producing audio drama and throwing it on Live365 etc.
I had to chuckle when I saw this Slashdot article - looking like they'd discovered some 'new thing'. In Britain, Radio 4 has had radio dramas for decades, and even long running radio soap operas. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy started as a radio play (and the radio version IMHO is the best).
:-)
The thing about radio dramas is they create special effects in your mind that would cost tens of millions to create in a film...on a budget many orders of magnitude lower than a film. You still need good actors for radio drama - but they don't have to look pretty. Also, a good actor can easily play three or four parts in a radio drama.
There are some excellent radio plays put out by the BBC - those people who live in deprived countries can get them on the internet, I'm sure
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
There's a charity that specializes in doing exactly that, through the efforts of volunteers.
(I've been thinking of giving it a go someday....)
iSKUNK!
So far the hardest part has been to get the Voice Actors to record with the same settings, as close to the same way as possible.
Nothing like a VA who doesn't understand the format request, giving 4khz/8bit when you ask for 44khz, 16 bit.
Or the VA who speaks three angstroms from the microphone.
Or the VA who practically whispers so quitely the 'cut off' clips most of her audio, and what you -do- get is "household" noise.
I'm still going to keep attempting this. I just find that the hardest part is Voice Actor wrangling.
These kinds of things are out there already. Try this streaming audio for old time radio shows:
http://www.live365.com/stations/knronline
Or:
http://www.live365.com/stations/otrnow
I agree it would also be nice to see new creative scripts and performances as another alternative to these oldies.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I think an "open source book" would be a very interesting experiment. Of course you'd have to limit who could update your CVS archive, or else lots of kiddies would continually give it the textual equivalent of the goatse treatment.
Still, I'd like to see someone try it. Maybe it would turn out to be a bland lowest-common-denominator mush, but OTOH maybe the authors would build on each others ideas to create something nice.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's not free (and it isn't really what you're talking about) but ZBS Media has been putting out sci-fi/fantasy audio dramas for close to two decades. Their most notable series are the Ruby Series (a film-noir detective set on another planet - I recommend the first one. Oh yeah, and she slows time. :) and Jack Flanders (an inter-dimentional traveller, for lack of a better description. More fantasyish. Check this one.) Both are awsome. They're also completely not-for-profit, so if you like their stuff you can donate at their website.
Enjoy.
Triv
Growing up in jamaica TV wasn't a commodity as it is today in the US. I remember spending weekend at our grand parents who didn't have electricity and all they had was an old radio. On sunday nights we would all listen to an english drama called the 'clithero kid' a sort of dennis the menice type deal. Not ony that they had day time radio drama's much like soap operas. That I must admit were very interesting. When I see shallow kids show's such as mighty morphing power rangers and well pick any big boob cop, warrior princess show they lack the depth of story that radio dramas have. All you need is a expressive actor and an old organ in teh back ground.
Rather than complicated, multi-part dramas (though those would be nice, too), what I would like to find is a collection of audiobooks in the same style as Project Gutenberg. That is, a competent reader, clearly recorded, reading works with unambiguous copyright clearance.
;))
I've recorded myself reading a few snippets from books on Project Gutenberg, and will spare anyone else from every listening to the results, so I can rule myself out as "a competent reader" for such a project, but there are a lot of folks with better voices.
(Ditto language learning materials! I'd like to be able to practice German, or learn some Spanish, by popping a CD of compressed files into a car player as I drive place to place. Eventually, those compressed files would be Ogg, but for now, I'd settle for MP3
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Link
I think I'm beginning to understand why it's called the lameness filter.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
all staying as faithful to the book as possible, without Hollywood's story-twisting and sensationalism spoiling it all.
Wait a minute, as faithful as "possible"? By stating that you're saying that you ARE willing to make changes that you deem approriate for whatever reason you are deeming it appropriate. Is this not what Hollywood does? If are willing to change the source material at all, then you shouldn't go around blasting others for changing the source material regardless of how "morally superiour" you consider your changes.
I bet a good place to find enthusiastic (but untrained and probably a little too full of themselves) voice talent and access to decent recording equipment is to propose this to the Radio (and maybe also TV) production classes that many larger high schools (or even colleges for that matter) offer. Maybe get the drama club involved WITH the broadcasting teachers.
THEN show them how they can use the internet as another way to distribute their final result.
I can think of a lot worse ways for a bunch of kids to waste their time.
Joe Frank has some really great stuff, check out Joe Frank Download Page
It's David St. Hubbins from Spinal Tap! The patron saint of quality footwear has branched into the fine dramatic arts! Or maybe that's to come in the BBC version of Exeter....
Be sure to check out the Star Wars: Second Strike site. They put together a radio drama using a cast from all over the world. MP3s are available for download.
-> Capt Cosmic <-
Up until the 1980s (but primarily in the 1950s), major radio stations produced audio dramas. Sometimes adaptations of books (including both of your examples, Treasure Island and Amontillado, and others of the ilk), sometimes pulp-magazine short stories, and sometimes originals.
A simple websearch for "OTR" or "Old Time Radio" will find many sources for digitized recordings- on CDROM, MP3, or streaming audio.
The providers / traders of these files seem to act as if the stuff is public domain. I guess they haven't heard of the Sonny Bono act. It's hard to blame them for ignoring the law- it seems quite silly to think that something broadcast in 1935 is still copyrighted.
In any event, the widespread availablity of last century's radio plays reduces the incentive for any modern group to work on reading Gutenberg texts aloud. No net.geek will do a better job than Orson Welles.
Lets encourage all authors who write a series of books to copyleft the first book of the series.
They will sell more their other books and the first book will be available to free distribution.
This will encourage reading and education.
Everybody wins. This could be active upon the authors death. What do yall think?
When it's done right, internet audio can be very professional, but unless you really have a coordinated effort, Joe Everyman with just a script and SoundForge, volunteers using Radio Shack mics and Windows Sound Recorder all adds up to something that had better have some damn good acting otherwise no one's going to listen past the first few seconds. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it isn't as easy to organize as distributed software development.
For any production project like this, the key ingredient is a good director.
The need for a single vision and focus for a dramatic project is very similar to the need for a central architect in an open software project.
Much of the lay-world thinks that open software is this magical process by which people from all over the world just throw code into a magic cauldron and out comes amazing free software. Clearly that's not the case. Every succesful project has a solid architect.
However, with audio drama, I wonder how effeciently a director could usher in change to a program. Especially if the actors were distributed (to use a geek term). In code, the architect leads by example. That's much tougher in dramatic circumstances.
If that major hurdle was cleared, I think even a group of mediocre actors could pull off a convincing performance given enough time and feedback from the aforementioned "dramatic architect"
I have recorded quite a bit of music in my bedroom, with very good quality. I recommend buying an Echo Mia card which is dirt cheap. Then get a mic, and perhaps a cheap guitar amp as a preamp, and plug the output of the guitar amp to the Mia instead of to them amp's speaker. The quality will astonish you. And also follow the basic rules like turn off your A/C, fans, anything that makes sound in your home, etc. Here's a sample of what it sounds like with something I've recorded.
I recently produced a radio drama exclusively for the Internet for downloading and also airing on my station RantRadio. There were 9 x 1 hour episodes coming from the creative mind of Sean Kennedy.
Called 'Tales from the Afternow', it's pretty damn creative and if you take into account that NONE of it is pre-written and all spoken on the fly your mind will be blown away. With background sound effects etc.. etc.. it's a good listen.
For decades the radio was "the" medium for performance art. Spoken word was king and it ruled the airwaves.
~ ey/audio.html
w mp3.h tml
Imagine hearing Orson Welles doing the Third Man every week or The Goon Shows when they were brand spanking new. There were some hits (Johhny Dollar, Mercury Theater, The Goon Show, The Great Gildersleve, XMinusOne, Dimmension X, etc) and some real duds (the plethora of soaps, the cheesy hard boiled detectives, the paper thin comedys)
Its hard to imagine but at one time folks would rush home at night to be able hear these shows, for those who are nowcentric that would be like preTivo TV watching.
Over the last few years there have been several groups activley preserving these gems in digital formats. Its amazing how much has been passed on and can be gotten.
If you want to listen to some these gems there are a mass of sites that have the shows. Some good starting places are
http://www.wayback.net/
http://users2.ev1.net/
For the Goon Shows try
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~robertd/GoonSho
For all the Jean Shepherd broadcasts you can devours head on over to
http://shep-archives.com/
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
I know they have given permission to universities to produce Coyote Radio scripts as class projects. Give them an e-mail if you are interested in seeing some scripts.
Some day they hope to have a streaming server for their material, but it is very expensive for a volunteer organization to mount.
I created one called StorySprawl a while ago - it's for people to actually write cyoa adventures together, and we started doing an audio rendition of one of them, chapter by chapter, "Dreams Of Esterton". Low budget but fun. The "old" version of storysprawl is at www.storysprawl.com and the new version is in development... people can always write me if they want to have access to one of the sample audio chapters.
Curt
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
I can't wait!! This will mean new episodes of "Geeks in Space" reading Shakespere, Dickens and Mark Twain!
...produce an audio drama based on free texts such as those from Project Gutenberg...
Gripping audio versions of The Inferno and Tom Jones! I cannot wait to fall asleep at the wheel while Virgil (in a nasally German voice) goes on for eight hours. Whee!
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
I remember living in Montreal in the mid 70s and there was a short lived radio play on CHOM radio called the 4th Tower of Inverness that played nightly for a while. What a blast! Almost 40 years later, I still think about it. Sometimes simplicity itself creates great works of art...
"While the technology exists to cut a play together, I see several possible problems:
Since the actors could be widely separated, can they act in isolation in a sufficiently convincing manner that they can be cut together later, in the same way that film actors must pretend that the special effects exist during shooting?
To the first point... high quality computer audio is dirt-cheap these days. A SB Live Value has better record/play fidelity than the majority of pro broadcast gear used in the 60' to 80's. 24-bit cards can be had for under $300. Decent mics are an order of magnitude less expensive than 10 years ago - eg a Chinese large diaphragm condenser for $99 (Nady, Marshall, APEX etc). Very effective multitrack software can be had for well under $100 (example www.ntrack.com). So the gear is THERE!
As far as a recording space...funnily enough, many radio drama studios pride themselves on how realistic a 'room' sound they can create. Amazing how much a living room can be made to sound like
The best sound effects for radio drama are custom-created and recorded, libraries might get used for hard-to-get stuff, or for less critical backgrounds. Again, a guy with a MD recorder (or a rented DAT) and a mic can gather just about any required effect.
The sellers of pro libraries have fallen on hard times. Pro Hollywood-grade libraries are selling at 50% or more off usual price. A good general 10-CD library can be had for under $300 on sale. Check out the Blue Plate Special at www.sound-ideas.com. And there's alot on $ 10 "multimedia" library CDs. And finally, tons of free stuff on the 'Net.
Regarding actor collaboration, yes you will still get the best results with the actors playing off each other in the same studio.
So, it would be easy and rewarding to do this over the Internet. Let's go!
There have been previous attempts as well, for instance Samuli Torssonen's Star Wreck
Began with Deluxeanimation, but quickly evolved into rendered battles and live-acting with a bluescreen. The humour factor is comparable to Exeter. (e.g. the quest to cause the most noise in a rockconcert gets disturbed by the Korg)
Part 6 is being filmed and post-processed even now.
Those of us in college in or even high school for music have the backgrounds, resources, and skills to produce pretty much any sort of music you could want, even big orchestral/choral stuff... most of my friends are majors and people have assembled some rather substatial ensembles for student films and whatnot...
My point is, it's a resource and it's out there.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Sure, acting is a skill, but that doesn't mean everyone with that skill makes a career out of it. There's lots of people out there that could do a servicable job at a project like this who aren't professional actors, and have a lot of fun doing it. I know I had fun doing a couple of student plays, and while I don't kid myself I'm the next De Niro, everyone laughed in the right places.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
My bad. Guess I missed the bit about Project Gutenberg texts...
:-)
RFBD does mostly new books, and educational ones at that. Copyright issues prevent the recordings from being freely distributed.
Anyway, these folks are interesting not so much because of their finished products, but because they recruit volunteers to record and produce them, and have all the actual equipment necessary to do that. It's a nifty way for hopeful voice actors / dramatic readers to get some footwork, and perform charity at the same time. (Yes, educational books only, but there's a whole art to not sounding like Ben Stein on Valium
P.S.: Someone please mod my previous comment (-1, Overrated)....
iSKUNK!
Yeah, I think that any town that has a decent community theater program would have very little issue with this. Hell with Keanu Reeves as a Superstar...how hard can it be, Dude! ;->
Sorry, I wasn't specific. They can release the shows, since they are pure new material. But they don't include the music video's with B&B's commentaries, which were usually funnier and more interesting than the actual episodes.
At least they didn't when they first came out, and as far as I know this hasn't changed. In a similar vein that makes me more certain this is still true, comments have been posted by people about the recently released Daria DVD's not having incidental background music, again presumably because of differences between broadcast and distribution rights.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
That site is *not* for the general public -only those who are blind or visually disabled. I tried to get them help me with my original site booksonmp3.com a few years ago and got nowhere! They do not want to risk their relationship with audio publishers (who, BTW, donate recent works to this charity).
We're now working on the same model with the rights to 20 audiobooks at audiobooks.org. I sure would appreciate suggestions on how we can get the bandwidth and disk space to get off the ground on a low budget.
Any sleight-of-hand, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from technology.
Down with hollywood! Up with kids who build star trek sets in their parents basements!
Although if the Exiter people keep on churning out good stuff, they could *accidently* produce a major hit, like the blair witch project...
Later on, I created my own scripts for my own interview show (It sucked in comparison). I then decided I'd do seperate voices. However, customizing Computer-Generated voices was not easy, and each line for each character would have to be recorded seperatly and then in the end edited together. It was quite a task, but in the end I churned out the source audio for the first episode. Editing them together was a problem becuase of the enormous spaces between lines, and it took a while for my simple editor to load the sometimes long lines. I never finished the project, and when an accident required the reformatting of my hard disk, I lost the source audio, and I don't think I'll ever be bored enough to finish it. But should a multi-voice text-to-speech program be available, I'll gladly put it to work.
This story, however, made me become interesting in actually having my friends, on whom my characters are based, do the voices. We all have computers, but only one of us has a burner and a broadband connection (me!), which is a bit of a problem. Also, none of us happen to have a microphone. But I suppose with a little bit of work, these limitations could be overcome. Microphones can be bought cheap, and quality isn't that big of a matter. I wonder if this is a good idea:
- Buy 3 microphones. Give one to each participant
- Have each one of us record our lines. Each line gets a seperate file. Use monaural format, and compress to 96kbps MP3.
- I set up an FTP server where the participants upload their files overnight (If their parrents will let them!)
- I edit them together and offer each participant a copy on CD-Audio (With MP3 on the disc as well)
The idea seems like it could work, but the uploading part could be the big hump. What do youI've been a big fan of audio drama for some time now. When I was 9, I'd listen to recorded versions of Star Trek novels. One time my mom rented me a copy of Star Wars done by the BBC. I'll never forget lying in bed with my tape player by my side. I still listen to audio-books, but more due to time constraints. But 16 discs for The Fellowship of the Ring, 14 for The Two Towers and 16 for The Return of the King almost makes me wish I wasn't such a stickler for unabriged copies!
Rawr
Check out http://todd.phys.psu.edu/fitd/ It is a Star Wars fan cartoon called Falling Into Darkness. Yours truly plays the voice of Grand Admiral Thrawn. On a side note the Alliance mentioned on hidden Jedi haven has nothing to do with the goings on in the regular StarWars universe. They are a force local only to that planet.
Why do some geeks seem to think that in order for something to be "groundbreakingly" interesting, it has to be done with the support of many people who, can you imagine, have never really met in person? Awesome, isn't it?
Don't forget that the real world still exists, that something just as interesting can be done outside of an internet collaboration, that you will probably get things done more easily by trying to find people in your own town who might be interested in this project, and that you might develop real-life friendships out of it, too...
...just look at Keanu Reeves! "I'm a meathead man. You've got smart people, and you've got dumb people. I just happen to be dumb." - Keanu Reeves
... here :
p ir ates_story-ep3.mp3
http://www.fantasgreat.org/piratestory/media/a_
Ugh, that licensing sucks.. If I could find a good source of public domain audio books I'd host them for free.
btw, how much bandwidth do you need for your booksonmp3.com paid stuff? 10's of gigs, 100's of gigs? different methods of paying for service have different sweet spots.. and of course there's more to it than just gigs/month.
The company I work for does some audio hosting so I know a little about it. email me
My younger sister is an AVA, or Amateur Voice Actress online. There's quite a community of voice actors, who frequently produce original radio plays, and those based on books, movies, anime or TV.
Fanfiction is perhaps the most popular form of online voice acting, as the producers and actors are able to take more liberties. Fandubs (generally the fan-dubbing of anime) are quite popular, as are rewriting books into script-format and recording them.
These generally turn out fairly well, sometimes better than professional dubs, and the actors record their lines in their own homes, without ever having met the rest of the cast.
The most popular site for AVA's is FLAVA (Fun Lovin' Aspiring Voice Actors).
The VAA (Voice Acting Alliance) is a very good place to learn more about how these productions are made.
One of the most popular original online radio plays, which is beautifully mixed, is Legacy of a Hero, and definitely sets the standard for amateur producing and acting. LoaH is highly recommended listening.
My sister's AVA resume will give an example of the range of productions.
In short, online voice acting, in people's homes, mixed with lines of other cast members whom they've never met, can work out incredibly well, and have been doing so for several years.
'The staff in the hand of a wizard may be more than a prop for age,' -Hamá, the doorward
KNX 1070 (1070 AM) broadcasts recordings of old radio programs every night at 9pm, and at 2am (a rebroadcast of the 9pm program of the previous night.) Programs like The Shadow, X-1, Box-13, The Jack Benny Show, and the Lone Ranger (among many others - there are two half-hour shows per night on most nights.) I'm personally waiting for them to get around to re-broadcasting Arch Obler's Lights Out series (they change the mix every year or so.) They also post lo-fi recordings of some of the shows on their website.
No emoticon exists to express the rage I feel now! ;)
Already being done: www.etc-edu.com
I think that one of the obstacles to performing a good audio drama over the web is latency. Any sort of artificial sounding delay could throw off the actors and make it hard to establish a convincing rapport. One solution I can think of would be to have a program that simultaneously records the actor in hi fidelity while streaming a low-fidelity but low-latency signal to the other party. This way, the synchronization can be kept, more or less. The less latency, the easier it will be for actors to ignore. Once the dialog has been recorded in this way, any wave editor could then be used to merge the two high fidelity recordings
Are you daft, man? You used the word! The M-Word! Don't you realize how devestatingly unlucky that is when you're in a play? You are now doomed. :-)
I'm the stranger...posting to
Heinlein stories as teleplays? Where do I drop off my severed body parts in exchange for this?
Sorry, but I can't quite make out where to get these, and I really want 'em. Can you clarify a bit?
Thanks.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Mike Eschman of Enigma Technologies Corp, a member of SchoolForge, has been doing exactly this for some time now.
He has created a set of scripts and tools to automatically generate audio recordings from Gutenberg texts, a number of which are now available from the etc-edu website, http://www.etc-edu.com/
I suggest you subscribe to the seul-edu (http://www.seul.org/edu)and/or SchoolForge (http://www.schoolforge.net/)mailing lists if you are seriously in discussing this further, since this is a fairly important educational topic.
btw, this is about the most pathetic list of replies I've ever seen! Sure, some humour is great, but most of this is rubbish.
Posted by DanUltra
so where would we get all the free voice actors? If you're paying, I'll sign up.
Nothing to do with making radio plays yourself, but for those interested in radio drama the BBC has recently launched a new Digital Radio station dedicated to comedy and drama. BBC Radio 7 is currently running stuff like Sherlock Holmes and the Pickwick Papers.
Someone mentioned LotR - BBC Radio 4's radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings dates from 1978 and has an all star cast on 13 CDs. Completely enthralling. I remember it from when I was a kid the first time round and bought it on CD when all the LotR hype came around with Peter Jackson's film. If anyone is interested in it, the catalogue number is ZBBC 1050.
I myself am an aspiring vocal actor and I can tell you that you would probably get a large turnout of talent if you had a well-organized project along these lines.
I mean, people act not primarily because it's something they're good at, but because it's something they like to do. The vast majority of actors don't get to do those things that really interest them, however. Vocal actors, especially, are often locked into what they feel is an endless rut of advertisements, radio spots or dead-end DJ jobs.
Giving them the chance to do something interesting and get a following would generate one hell of a turnout, I think.
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Could the problem of distance be solved by using a low-quality constant audio stream, with a local high quality recording being used for the production piece? Sort of like an audio Edit Decision List?
Rule of the open mind
People who are resistant to change cannot resist change for the worst.
I don't know if this is something you'd be interested but the evangelical christian group "Focus on the Family" produces some very high production value radio dramas. They are obviously coming from a conservative evangelical christian position but most of their dramatisations are of classics & childrens classics. For example: Silas Marner
Les Miserables
Billy Bud by Melville
Dicken's A Christmas Carol
C. S. Lewis'The Chronicles of Narnia
the Secret Garden
I've also heard that their dramatisation of the life of Deitrich Boenhoffer is very good.
What, current affairs isn't enough homegrown drama for people to consume?
LOL - and I mean that literally I really did laugh out loud when I ran across this post.
Ah well, that's what it is, after all.
All my previous work has been music videos with puppets and virtual sets. All amateur, all for fun. Check them out if interested...
http://www.fluffandsuch.com/
~ Nonsanity
as if that's not bad enough, there are also issues of 'sync' (if the incidental music is believed to go along with the plot) and 'mechanical' rights (some other dumb fucking thing).
I can't belive you guys missed THE AMBIT. Look for it. I don't remember the URL but it's an amazing 9 hour show in the cyberpunk vaine. Really very good. AND you can get the whole thing on the web!
You clowns who think your StarWars/StarTrek pardory stuff is funny should get laid or something. Really freaking sad.