March Madness

No, not talking about basketball, although most people think that's the point of March.  March is a crazy month every year now.  Somehow, I end up with a lot of projects happening around this point of time.  Faith Heritage is doing Singing in the Rain and the next two weeks is when I am showing up to the school to get the lighting and sound setup for the big shows.

Until this year, I am usually doing two plays.  Faith Heritage and Clary Middle School.  Mike Hook, however, is now no longer working at Clary as he is full time Missionary.  To help me not feel as if I have an easy year, I am also working on their missions DVD.  Trust me when I say this is not a hardship.  I am honored to be given this task.  My last post was about going with them to one of their services.  This is about a process that a lot of people don't understand about production.  That it takes a lot of time and energy.

Recording their audio for the video was fun, long and very tiring, especially for them.  To give you an idea of the process, I'm going to try and give a basic rundown.  The first day was getting them used to doing this.  We had a script that none of us were thrilled with but thankfully, rewrites can happen.  I had each of them take turns reading chunks of the script, then we would listen to it to see which sounded best for the dialog.  We didn't finish it, mostly because the ending wasn't right.  So, after packing up I went home and cut up all that we had into one file.  We had about 2:40 of material from 3 hours of recording work.

Day two, we go through and record the ending.  A little quicker but we were tired.  They were tired and the energy wasn't there.  Mike sounded depressed and I knew we had to do it again.  However, after this session I realized that there was a problem with the audio from the first round.  Guess what, we had to do the whole thing over. 

The third session, we started out with breakfast.  I also realized I needed them to stand up in order to read.  Why, because this helps keep energy up and you don't get lazy.  Plus, you actually sound better when you read standing up than when sitting.  We also knew who was saying which line, so they only had to do those lines.  We worked on this for another 2 - 3 hours, but voice over is done.  Now, I just need to finish getting the videos and DVD done and ready.  Of course, this is while I'm getting Faith Heritage stuff done as well.

As I said, it's March Madness.