Well, a good friend told me that I could put a Lord Morrisey Morrisey sketch online for the elucidation of all and sundry, and I thought the idea was good.
I was wrong.
The idea was sound; the problem is all about time.
A few weeks back my writing and lecturing partner, Jon, went to Australia to educate people about the evils of intellectual property rights, a worthy cause and one that also gave me free reign to teach as I pleased for an entire week. I had written a Morrisey and Stickle sketch for the Thursday wherein we would have an example of a conspiracy. Because Jon was to be away we prerecorded his dialogoue and I rewrote the sketch so that Commodore Stickle was giving information over the phone from the fictitious country of Rutultania.
Alright, enough background.
Last night I decided that it was just the right time to quickly bung together all the extant SFX and vocal work, quickly record the rest of the dialogue and then put it all together.
The word ‘quickly’ has never been so wrong.
To produce three minutes worth of work it took me over two and a half hours; had I known it would take so long I would have taken more time with my own voice overs, seeing that the Morrisey, Maxim and Narrator parts were recorded quickly and dirtily. I should have taken the script and worked out, exactly, what my voice should have sounded like at each moment, and I should have been more careful to make sure that the three parts actually sounded different. But, as I thought this was going to be the work of a moment to produce, I did not.
One hopes to learn from this mistake.
More importantly, for the long term, the process was educational. I was using ‘Cacophony,’ an OS X sound editor that supports multiple channels, which was a help when creating the different dialogue tracks and putting music into the background, but the implementation left much to be desired, as it was fairly awkward to place dialogue on to a channel and the inability to play all the channels at once without resampling down to stereo was a definite hindrance. The ‘Jack Danger and Trip Hazard’ material I plan to write post March of next year will be fairly complex pieces of sound engineering, and now I know that professional equipment (or professional software) is a must for this kind of work.
Enough of my worries; for those who want to hear the sketch, here it is: The Mysterious Case of the Aspirant Demagogue Be warned; it really is part of a pedagogy and thus probably only has value when appreciated in a lecture with the surrounding material.