Well, today has been one hell of a day.
It started out awesome. Tomorrow, I’m going to be on an episode of the awesome ‘Tweet me Harder’ (The World’s First Best Only and Last Talkback Enabled Interactive Audio Podblast) and we did the pre-record today.
I have to say that David Malki is the man. I recorded my part over Skype (It was awesome, I get to play one of the main villains, say some truly ridiculous lines and die a spectacular death), but I make no bones about it, I’m a fucking awful actor…which wasn’t helped by the fact I got the script literally minutes before recording…but Malki was really patient and encouraging, offering advice without ever telling me that I was sucking out loud.
Acting is one of those things that sounds really easy until you try it. I think I did okay, but I mean ‘okay’ as in ‘okay for a complete and total amateur’.
What wasn’t helpful was that Sunny left just before I started recording and was stopped by her mother on the way out of the drive because her mom wanted to borrow some garden loppers from us…so Sunny told her that I was going to be busy recording for the podcast, that it was super important and that I couldn’t be disturbed…so she could run back to the house and get the loppers for her before she left. Her mom said that, no, it was fine, there was no rush, so she’d get them when Sunny got back.
Ten minutes later, Malki calls me on Skype, we start recording and there’s a knock on the door. It’s Sunny’s mom. Figuring she’d just go away when I didn’t answer, I ignore it and keep reading my lines. You see, time was a huge factor and Sunny’s mom never just comes and goes, she’d have been here for fifteen minutes… and when a very popular podcaster/cartoonist that you’ve never spoken to before gives you the opportunity to appear on his highly popular podcast, you don’t put him on hold.
…but when I didn’t answer she started hammering on the door…for five minutes straight. When that didn’t work, she called the housephone.
I swear, she does it on purpose. There’s no other explanation. Why else would you hammer on the door of someone you’ve just been told is busy with something important?
Oh, and when you know someone is home, but they don’t answer the door…take the hint.
Anyway, after trying to concentrate with the door being hammered on, I got through the script, which was a hell of a lot of fun. Looking back, there’s a lot of things I’d have done differently, but like I said, time was a major factor and if Malki was happy, I was happy.
Then tonight, it was time to record our podcast. We’ve been crazy busy and stressed out with Visa stuff all week, but it was super important that we got an episode out because we’d already missed last week’s. So we record, the show goes much better than expected, considering we didn’t have time to do any prep work…and then my laptop crashes when I try to save.
Oh, Audacity saves your recording alright…but for some unknown reason, it saves temporary files in six second chunks.
Have you any idea how long it takes to put 70 minutes of audio back together manually in six second pieces?
I’ll tell you, a long fucking time.
Well, once I’d done that, I played the audio, only to find everything had been slowed down by about 15 percent. I have no idea why. So then I got to speed the audio a little, listen to it, and repeat ten or twenty times, speeding it up and slowing it down until we sounded normal.
Now it’s 1am, I’ve been up since 6am…and this episode is supposed to have been up this afternoon.
It’s gonna be late.
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