...fluorescent light, incandescent light, reading light, artificial light, natural light...
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Monday, September 18, 2017
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
I Hear Voices
First, beauty tips from the guy with the perfect face for radio! Actually they're from Audrey Hepburn.
I got into the instructional media business as a small-town radio announcer. We broadcast from a place in the mountains east of Salt Lake City. I had the morning shift, so I was "big-time," competing with the metro drive-time DJs. My most popular program, though, was something that I never heard the big-market announcers read. My most popular feature was reading the school lunch menu. If I ever neglected to include the school lunch menu in my news line-up, I got angry phone calls. "How am I supposed to send my kid to school if I don't know what they're serving for school lunch?" You try and make the menu sound interesting. It's tougher than a server telling you the day's specials in a restaurant. So I'd try to liven up my presentation with false enthusiasm: "Pizza slices, cheddar cheese sticks, green beans, crisp carrot sticks, and milk!" (Ha, ha, I just looked up my local school's menu online and there are
far better offerings that when I was reading... and I can get the
nutritional info on everything!)
As I got into media production, I'd actually hire and direct some of those big-market voices to read my scripts. Since I read several myself, it's easy to see why those ladies and gentlemen have the reputation and the following they do. They make the content seem understandable, easy to learn. One of the best narrators we ever worked with was a schoolteacher. She was accustomed to reading stories to her students. Perfect!
Once, not too long ago, we were auditioning voices for a project. The voice was a low-key male version of Apple's Siri. "Sorry," we said. "We don't want an automated voice for this project."
"Oh, that's not an automated voice," we were told. "That's so-and-so, who must have been in a quiet mood that day."
"Uh, how 'bout you give him a cup of coffee and give us a different narrator?" If our learners have to listen to someone for a long bit of training, we'd like the voice to sound interested in the content and sound interesting in its own right.
I've worked with some wonderful voices over the years. Those voices belong to some wonderfully professional people. Let me gather up some stories and contact info about them and I'll include them in an updated post.
To steal some of Billy Crystal's cachet, "It doesn't matter how you feel, as long as you sound good. And darling, you sound maaarvelous!"
As I got into media production, I'd actually hire and direct some of those big-market voices to read my scripts. Since I read several myself, it's easy to see why those ladies and gentlemen have the reputation and the following they do. They make the content seem understandable, easy to learn. One of the best narrators we ever worked with was a schoolteacher. She was accustomed to reading stories to her students. Perfect!
Once, not too long ago, we were auditioning voices for a project. The voice was a low-key male version of Apple's Siri. "Sorry," we said. "We don't want an automated voice for this project."
"Oh, that's not an automated voice," we were told. "That's so-and-so, who must have been in a quiet mood that day."
"Uh, how 'bout you give him a cup of coffee and give us a different narrator?" If our learners have to listen to someone for a long bit of training, we'd like the voice to sound interested in the content and sound interesting in its own right.
I've worked with some wonderful voices over the years. Those voices belong to some wonderfully professional people. Let me gather up some stories and contact info about them and I'll include them in an updated post.
To steal some of Billy Crystal's cachet, "It doesn't matter how you feel, as long as you sound good. And darling, you sound maaarvelous!"
Thursday, September 7, 2017
Capitalization: Your dog's name is Dog?
Even in the most professional of settings, over-capitalization sneaks into our writing. Unless you're Karl Marx, you generally don't do business with the State... you do business with the state. You could do business with the State of California, since that's the full proper name of that state. The sentence, "I just became a Grandpa," just isn't right. "I just became a grandpa, so everyone in the family is calling me Grandpa Les," is better. It lets nouns be nouns and proper nouns be proper nouns.
When I was teaching basic programming, students could come up with some pretty impressive code. The real test was whether or not they could repeat it. Did they stumble onto their solution, or did they really understand what they were coding? Were they throwing pasta against the wall to see if it sticks, or were they cooking pasta with purpose? "Whatever you do, do it intentionally, not by accident."
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Run 'n Gun Videography
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| https://runandgunvideography.com/run-gun-videography/ |
The book is a fun read. It grew out of this website: https://runandgunvideography.com/ or the website grew out of the book, a chicken-and-egg relationship. Both get my recommendation.
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