Behind the Scenes ….
Today I’m editing up the sounds for the Valentine’s software. Roy was asking for a little “behind the scenes” so today I have the recording session for each voice actor for each theme.
I then have to chop up every word and phrase, keeping the good ones, throwing out the bad ones.
Then each word needs equalizing (so they are all similar volumes, but not louder than the music as I want to keep the impact of the music intros ), cleaning up, saving and labelling.
And with every word for every lesson recorded 3 or 4 times for every voice actor you can see how we end up with hundreds of audio files for each session.
These then all need manually inputting into the words & games section of the lesson.
As you can imagine it’s quite tedious (especially the labelling!) 🙂
But it needs to be done as I need to make sure every recording is fun, genki, clear and enunciates the phonics correctly.
So although each lesson’s song might only be 1 minute there are several hours of audio for each Genki English volume!
The good news is that this is how you become a phonics ninja.
I have now spent so many hundreds of hours doing this for 15 volumes, I can just look at a waveform and know exactly what phonemes there are and exactly where they start and begin.
Looking at the raw English this way you end up learning WAY more than any academic analysis of phonics could ever give you! 🙂
OK, back to work! 🙂
Know exactly what you are going through Richard having been a sound engineer in a previous life. It was cutting and splicing tape when I started and then the advent of digital made things a little easier. These days I am often surprised by what my daughter can do just on her phone chopping up and re-mixing music for her singing group. If you happen to get bogged down and could do with a hand just let me know, would be happy to help. (even with the labelling!)