Unexpected problem

[janewheeler]

I know Ethan's not supposed to be British, but it's just an added bonus, Ruth

[ruthmadison]

Oct 9, 2012 17:56:35 GMT -5 janewheeler said:

I know Ethan's not supposed to be British, but it's just an added bonus, Ruth

Hahaha!

Well, that's not a bad thought at all.

I wonder if it would be strange to have one character be voiced by someone else and everything else by me!

[spurs2000]

That I can seeing being potentially strange and not working. Only one way to find out! I could read a few lines for you and see if it works for you, if not dispense with the idea! You can always ask me when it will fit for different characters in the future!

[Ynis Ainu]

I've become very interested in podficcing lately and have started to read aloud myself, also participating in the odd reading project. Since then, I'm also paying much more attention to the audio books and podfics I listen to and to the way they are read.

My main (and, of course, very personal) impression is that doing several voices, accents, and particularly pecular speech patterns only works well when the speaker/reader can do it very well. If not, or if he/she doesn't have much experience with it yet, it can make for a really bad reading, even if the general reading is good. I found I prefer a good narrator not doing voices to one overdoing it or doing it badly. I also found that as a non-native speaker and listener of English, following some podfics without having read the text/story in advance can be very difficult with an untrained reader, particularly if different voices are done.

My own first tries showed me that while I seem to be able to do different voices well enough, it sounds different with each try of the same text or further down the text, sometimes to the point when the character seems to be someone different. Listening to my samples myself I get distracted by that and find the parts/tests where I'm "only" narrating much better to listen to. Experienced readers tell me I'm yet lacking the experience to do voices consistently, and sticking to "narrating only" or "mostly" would make for better readings for the time being.

[Deleted]

Podfics, never heard of them bit sounds great

[Ynis Ainu]

I first learned about them when I got my first Ipod and looked up free podfics in Itunes. I soon found out that there were all kinds of podfics about fandom and fanfiction, though I didn't listen to the much, as I had lots of troubles with American English spoken by enthusiastic fans doing the podfics. Then I first heard about fanfic being read by volunteers for a fanfic author who could no longer read them herself due to visual impairment following a brain tumor, and found it awesome in general and to do this for her in particular.
Since then, I saw "podficcing" popping up everywhere, though I don't know much about how and where it started and where are the best places to go for it. But I've offered my own fic for a podfic fest two years ago or so, and am following a current podfic fest and perhaps even participate as a reader.

I think it's really a great way to participate in any fannish community and to create more fanworks and make them better available for more people. Of course, as all of this is read by volunteers, this has advantadges and drawbacks. Some are enthusiastic hobby readers going to lots of extents to do the soundfiles, having good hardware equipemnt and so on, and training hard to produce high qualtiy audio files and readings. Other just go about it for fun, and you get perhaps low-quality files with lots of ambient noise, and probably might not understand the reader well or at all due to accent or untrained reading. But no matter the quality, it's read by a human being doing so with love and enthusiasm, and that alone makes usually for a lovely listening experience.