Voice-Over Completed.Yeah.

Having the role of working on Sound, it is now my responsibility to complete the voice-over, include certain sound effects and make sure it's all in one place. In today's lesson (Monday 1st Feb 2010), I was starting to listen and improvise the soundtrack as well as Raza's voice-over. Luckily, Phill was available at the time and helped me out in terms of a "realistic" approach and a much more "smoother base". While he was helping me improvise the voice-over, I was taking notes on what I've learnt for future references, as whilst Phill was doing his thing, he taught me what he was doing and why. So far, this is what I've learnt;

• Reverb: The purpose for 'reverbing' your dialogue, is to prevent any form of echo. (Which is what was likeyly, especially the dialogue recorded from the studio room which was a small rather empty room) So to reduce reverb, you simply click on the button on the bottom right of your Garageband screen and reduce it by dragging it left or right.
• Compresser: The function for compressing your work is to sustain it all on one level, for instrance all the dynamics (loudness) was on the same level of dynamics. This was a problem for Michael's voice-over as Michael's vocals are varied, thus in order to balance out his vocals and voice, you simply compress his voice by clicking on the 'compresser' button on garageband.
• Visual EQ: This is very important as it, similarly, also blends a type of voice with the music being played in the background to prevent anything being too loud or quiet, it's all on the same level, thus visually perfect on screen.
• Track Automation: This is a vital tool which helps manipulates the sound heard through adding little dots on the voice-over to smoothen out the sharp sounds and reverse dialogue. For instance, we had a problem when the music started off calmy and smoothly but then automatically, Michael's voice simply 'hit' the music with a sharp deep note. Thus, to reduce the sharpeness, one must add circles in a line and start curving them in order to smoothen Michael's voice and balance it with the music.

In today's lesson, everyone was sustained to their roles which is great as we're drawing closer to the dealine. Here's what everyone was doing in today's lesson;

• Raza: Raza was mainly focused on the editing and started adding slow-motion to some action events to add effect. He constantly showed me his progress which helped me to enable what has been done and what needs to be done. Fortunately, everything's going pretty fast and Raza and Suhail have decided to stay behind on the Wednesday evening at 3-4pm to carry on editing certain shots.
• Suhail: Suhail was multi-tasking which was a huge advantage as he was helping Raza out with the duration of shots and cutting the strips and give advice on what to do, yet at the same time he helped me with the voice-over through more advice as he told me what sounded well and what didn't, he was where I needed a second point of view, to prevent bias to the voice-over. Luckily, he was very honest and told me what to do and how to do it.
• Hina: I simply carried on and completed the voice-over with Phill's assistance. Thanks to Phill's advice on the Reverb, Echo, Compression, Visual EQ and Track Automation, I have now completed the both voice-over's (teacher's version and protagonist's version) and have saved it to the student database where Raza can access it easily.

Progress:

So far, everyone is up-to-date. We currently have two weeks remaining and now that the voice-over is complete, we can now all focus on just editing the shots through captions, logo's and music. Raza and Suhail have decided to stay over on the two Wednesdays we have left over, 3 till 4. Unfortunately, me and Sameria have lessons at the time but we will visit them at 4 where we will play a passive role as giving advice and watching their overall progress and start checking and adding changes or improvements to it. We have two weeks to go, and hopefully if we carry on at this rate, we should be able to complete it just in time! :D