J.M. Black – Media Shenanigans!

Hello hello!

This week we finally had our recording session for an upcoming actual play companion podcast to Cosmara. Let’s talk about recording an actual play podcast!

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I listen to a lot of actual play content. As televised sports are to the sports fan, there’s something to tuning in to listen to your favourite D&D players roll dice and move forward another week with their characters. Closer to long running TV drama than sports really, but there’s an electricity to listening to the outcomes of the dice rolls!!

So I was super excited to record this upcoming podcast! Though I can’t reveal anything about any of the content until its release, I’ve been reflecting a lot about the technical side of the recording session.

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Do You Hear That Sound? That Beautiful Sound?

We recorded with 5 mics and the sessions ranged from around 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 30. The actual set up took a little bit longer than expected, but part of it was making sure the placements of the boom arms felt sensible and natural. They needed to be close enough to the players to capture their voice right, while being out of the way of paper character sheets and rolling dice, while also being ideally away from eye level so the cast could look at each other while performing. I think we found the sweet spot!

A major consideration was unwanted sounds. The bench seats in the room were replaced with individual quieter chairs, which were wonderfully silent but also a little lower than the bench seats. Everyone looked quite cute sat around the table!

Other sounds like jingling of watches or jewellery were signposted ahead of time to the cast. Contact with the table was a consideration, so we used the boom arms to minimise vibrations coming from the table (the shock mount in the SM7Bs really helped too), and tested on mic how writing with pencil and rolling dice sounded.

The dice were fine, and welcome sounds to include in the show! The pencil was fine as long as a book was used to rest the paper on. I don’t think we had any issues with unwanted sounds once these were taken care of! Only a couple of exterior sounds beyond our control, which we could just edit around!

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You Got The Power!

Another thing was consideration of battery and power. Earlier this week I ran an experiment with the Zoom H8. I plugged three dynamic mics into it on high gain, changed the batteries to a fresh set (rechargeable), and kept an eye on the time to make sure it would last a full recording session without failure or any issues.

I found that it lasted 1 hour 40 minutes. Assuming two more mics would drain the power a little more, but not by much as no mics are using phantom power from the H8, I guessed that we might have a decent 1 hour 20 minutes.

This fit well with the schedule which placed each recording session at 1 hour 15 minutes each.

I discovered shortly after though that I had an adapter that fits the H8 and plugs into the mains. So we didn’t have to think about battery life during the recording session. One less thing to have to focus on!

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Scheduling

A final consideration for the recording session was scheduling. The way things worked out, we got everything we needed but fell a little behind schedule by the end of the night. This is due to a number of factors, some out of our control, but considering the time we had it wasn’t a bad batch record!

I think learning from this project, there needs to be a little more contingency time at the beginning and end of the recording day. Our time was limited so the schedule was packed tight – but ideally if we can build in this extra time in a smarter way, it would save having to shuffle things around too much during the day.

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Despite this, it went pretty smoothly! We adapted as we did, the cast were fantastic, and we have what we needed to record done!

As of today (Thursday 25th), I’ve also started post production on episode 1. But that’s a story I’ll tell once the episodes are out in the wild for people to listen to!

Until then, actually go play, reader!

-J

Joke of the Day!

Q: What do you call an actual play where everything is true?

A: Factual Play.