OUAN501 - Practical, Narration

As soon as I had finished the script I was fortunate enough to get a time to record the narration the very same day. This was the first time I had ever recorded my own voice so I anxious to see if I would be able to relay the script in a clear and colourful way. During the narration process I tried to avoid speaking in a monotone manner as much as I could and I think I progressively got better the more I did. The set up for the recording was as basic as it gets. It consisted of a condenser microphone behind a pop filter to block out any unwanted sounds and the software I used was audacity which simply allowed me to record a track and remove certain sections before exporting the audio file. Depspite the incredibly simple set up, it's all I needed for the purpose of recording the narration. From start to finish the recording process took just under an hour. I thought this was quite good since I had to sometimes do up to 10 takes on a single section. I contemplated the idea of recording smaller sections of the narration, around a sentence or two so that I could take regular breaks. I decided against this idea because it may result in a strange transition between sections half way through a section. I made sure to have around two or three version of each section unless it went smoothly first time. By doing this it meant I had a range of variations that I could swap out if something about a particular line or the way a word was said I didn't like. The experience itself was a big learning curve and I think doing it has improved my ability to narrate and recite a script. I believe this is because I could playback what I was saying and critique it in order to make adjustments. Initially I suspected that it would be strange hearing my own voice narrating something but this faded almost immediately, and it felt quite normal.

Overall I'm pleased with how the narration turned out and considering it's my first time narrating my own work I was relatively pleased with how it worked. I think I made the right decision to narrate it myself as oppose to getting someone else to do it because I knew exactly what I wanted and it allowed me to turn the recording round in about an hour. If time wasn't such a big factor at this stage I would have considering trying the narration with someone with a better voice for the task. However, I think by doing this it has given me the ability to realise first hand what goes into narrating something well and with a little more practice I think I could improve quite a lot. One regret I have is not taking a bottle of water with me to drink inbetween takes. I hadn't realised how dry my voice would become and how quickly this would happen - this is simply due to a lack of experience. Due to this in parts my voice does sound a little more raspy than usual but it isn't really destrimental to the piece.