Cadavre Exquis, Valentine Hugo, A Landscape c. 1933

This assignment was fun: more play than work for me.  By way of full disclosure, I use to do voice-over work for a living, so I came to the project with that lens.  However, since Maggi Delgado (our producer) and I were the only folks on our team who admitted to having production experience, our Bartleby, The Scrivener audiobook, was not actually created the way a professional production might have been.  Had this been that kind of endeavor, the workflow might have been something like this: the producer hires a writer to cut the script, hires talent to do the voices, maybe hires a sound designer for the music and special effects, and finally works with an editor to assemble the final product.  There would have been rehearsals, and likely at least three voice-actors gathered to lay down their tracks.  Also, possible that the dialog scenes would have been voiced by the actors together.  Our process was nothing like that. 

At our first meeting, we decided on a simple workflow: 

• Rather than editing the story together, montage suggested we use a variation of the Exquisite Corpse game. The voice-actors (myself, Ostap Kin, and montage) would choose whatever passages we wanted to voice, and the result would be a surprise. 
• I had some push-back with the idea that only the producer would see the elements we created because I knew how much additional work that would make for Maggi. We agreed that we would instead use a shared Google document to highlight our desired passages and not overlap.  That way, Maggi would have a script to follow for their editing. 
• Our producer made their Google drive and Dropbox account available to us to upload the digital assets we created into a shared space.  They also organized our Zoom meetings.
• Our scribe, Kevin Pham, would track the team’s process and create the class presentation.
• We also set an exact schedule for deliverables, so our producer would have ample time to create a rough cut. And we would then have time to make changes if needed.
• We agreed to use the same email thread for all team communication, so everyone was kept “in the loop” during the production process.

I did a rough cut of the shared Google document, cutting about half of the content.  I did this in part because the script is the most important asset for me as a producer, and I could not decide on what to voice until I had a semblance of a working script.  However, I did those edits via strike-through text, not as actual deletion of the material.  That way, my teammates could see my ideas for form but were free to ignore them for their process.   

Once I had the script, I used a Yeti Blue Streamer mic and Audacity to lay down the track.  Maggi had asked for a single audio file using the *.wav format.   It took me about four hours to lay down the 40 minutes of audio.  It was mostly a single take.  I had to re-record a couple of sections where I could hear I’d mispronounced words on playback. Still, since I was not going for perfection for the most part but rather for energy and when appropriate humor (Melville is funny!), it not being perfect seemed in keeping with the assignment.

We had a meeting after Maggi had shared their rough-cut, and it was great!  Here is where we, as the makers, got to experience the Exquisite Corpse process in practice.  Maggi had edited our work down considerably, but still kept the core of the story.  She’d created interesting effects with my voice when I said Bartleby’s lines, so he sounded robotic.  montage had found an audio filtering platform that allowed her to type copy into the engine and have it voice the speaker as a posh-sounding English gentleman.  However, those files’ quality was not great because she had to use her cellphone’s mic to capture them, so when Maggi raised their volume, they became distorted.  As a listener, not understanding all of the words was very frustrating … precisely the way the narrator felt when dealing with his scrivener!  So that was really fun.  Finally, Ostap did a great job with his pieces.  His delivery had an individual pensive self-awareness that was an excellent match for the text. 

Additional changes were minimal; our last meeting was about talking about the process and learning what we’d done.  The final piece of the puzzle was Kevin’s presentation.  We didn’t see that until class.  Wow, it was impeccable too!  He gave an excellent summation of our process, explained the framework, and pulled it all back to the readings. 

Again, this was an enjoyable project.  Thank you, Maggi, for doing such a fantastic job as our producer.  Thank you, montage, for helping us to find our intellectual framework.  Thank you, Ostap, for bringing such humanity to the voice of the narrator.  And thank you, Kevin, for representing our team so brilliantly in class.  I hope all my collaborations this semester go so well.