From the Stomach #2

It's often that the housemates - and student village as a whole - make a racket 'till about one in the morning, but god damn. Yannis and Rob were drunken crazes (as my previous entry foreshadowed), especially when the former of the duo was screaming like Hendrix with his guitar, hanging halfway out of his window (So I heard).

As such, I got up at about 9:00 and woke myself with will-power. It's an odd occasion when I was so desperate to get up (lest I 'accidentally' be late) yet I dozed off into miniature dreams depicting a weird Inception-esque situation somehow relating to my potential lack of time keeping.

When I departed it was already 9:59am, and my session was at 10:00! Yipes, I power walked and amazingly got to B124 in just 3 or so minutes. Andy Joules was casually sitting in the room, and it was spacious like last week. Good signs of more voice practice to be done - sure enough, two of the instructors arrived! It was Lucy like before, and a new guy.

James, I think his name was, sported a standard grey cap, open fleece and typical jeans. He looked the typical Joe but I kept thinking sk8er, too. He looked enthusiastic so I didn't want us to put him off, or anything. Lucy picked a bad shirt on her part. I can't explain this without sounding the pervert, but did she not notice how tight her shirt was? :(

We did some of the activities, roughly the same, from last week. The first was shaking the body - limbs, hands, and others. I sucked at this, and was being far too vain over letting go and rattling mah' bones.
Next was based around remembering names, yet this instance was having a person duck if the guy in the middle pointed and said bang - the two people beside would then have a sort of quick-draw in who imaginarily shot each other. Person who didn't respond quick enough would be out.

Our first exercise was based on what we had to plan from last week which I of course forgot. It was picking a excerpt of dialogue (pause, pace or tone based) and practicing on it. Well, only two or so actually remembered to do this. Nonetheless, some had a crack at it but not everyone (including not me). I initially planned to do dialogue of 'whispering', as I wanted to demonstrate arrogance on one character and bullied culprit on another - then I switched to a Public Service Announcement warning of bad things to come - which I'm guessing was taken from the film 2012. I wanted to do the dialogue in a harsh manner with an accent influenced by the Spy from Team Fortress 2. Probably couldn't pull that off effectively with my current practice in voice acting, but that would of been nice.

When those who DID voice the scripts stand up to do theirs, it was intriguing. All of us had to position ourselves as groups in context to the situation: crowd for the public announcement, sitting audience from the book exerpt and circle for the, uh, public announcement again. (In manner of a preach/rally) The first instance that one guy did the public announcement, when questioned about the 'motifs' of his character, situation and so on, he was giving answers which I am pretty sure are coming from The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 because like I said, I swear that dialogue is from there - so I don't blame him. One thing he was advised to do and practice is to raise his voice and severity of his expression - to help him with that, we pretended to 'chat' as uninterested folk whilst he repeatedly tried "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN" in vain. I had to 'chat' with the instructor James which felt kind of awkward because I certainly am not one to hold a conversation - let alone improvise one on the fly.

Our next challenge was a Mr.Men story - specifically Mr. Quiet. I was paired with James, the chinese chap, which is good as I could see what his practice in accent provided. We had to basically play the role of one character and the other - and after hearing Jame's fairly decent performance on a shopkeeper of a Grocer's (whom we mistook for the Butcher - frankly their lines could easily be the same) - I decided to give a shot on Mr. Quiet himself. We had some practice runs on the script and James kept cracking up over my acting on Mr. Quiet. I don't think it was that bad, but maybe he didn't expect that kind of performance given my naturally deep voice? Instead of cliche whispering of sqeeky voices that the majority of others settled on, I went with a kind of weak and feeble one.

It came to our turn to perform, and James eventually failed to retain his laughter when I enacted some of my lines, particularly the Butcher humming and whistling. I whistled the Steamboat Mickey tune, which I hope some class mates had picked up on. I liked Jame's accent on the Grocer's, it was pretty good in character.

Final task was to pair up in groups of two or three, depending on the script. I switched over to a then group of two people, and the three of us had to enact a scene from...the Lion Witch and the Wardrobe. This scene was featuring four characters, so I played the part of two. The girl next to me played the 'annoying' boy (I thought it was annoying girl, unless Narnia films are separate?) who betrays his friends, guy beside me played the evil witch and I voiced Enwick or something - a humble servant, and another character was a typical troll-like slave. Our rehearsing was fun, and I enjoyed getting into character. Sadly the slave-character had a bit of singing to do, but I did my best.

When we did ours, I botched up badly by forgetting that I had a line part-way through the script which was lost in all the context-writing. Still, I was merited somewhat by my effort along with the two good peeps I partnered with. Good times! Andy Joules sat at the back, arms crossed like a titan, and I hadn't realised, thank god.

It was lunch time, and I chatted with the instructor James a little bit on how to practice on varying the tone and character of the voice, and if I could even do it. He voiced a few examples of what is possible with a bit of practice and I was amazed. His speciality isn't voice acting, of course, but he changed personalities of his voice to startling degrees. Pip-squeek high to thunderous growling, and various others. It gave me a lot of encouragement, and now I do want to practice achieving all sorts of different effects by using my diaphragm, and overall practicing!

During the course of the break, at first I bought a few snacks and sat down in the SU but realised I could of left my door unlocked as I ran out to lesson this morning - walking back to my room door, I realise I had actually locked it. Maybe I just became so accustom to the process I didn't realise it even happens.

1:00 came about and went to G01 - Sophie was there yet again, but the rest of the class wasn't. Oh crap, are they actually doing the Sound Recording elsewhere for real this time? Checked the pin-board for the time table and indeed it was in a different room - G24 if I recall. 'Twas close by to G01 anyway, and people were still waiting outside. Ron gave us all a sheet with advice and instructions on voice acting, and tipped a little bit more on utilising characterisation of animation, as well as recording one person on one channel individually. We would all wait about 10 minutes longer as the man who'd meant to be teaching us today couldn't attain the keys for the studio - the former teacher there had left them in, or so. Emergency man came along with an extra set it and opened it up.

Wow, the Sound Recording room looked...kind of underwhelming! The rooms were tiny, and it didn't look very well sound-proofed. Nonetheless, we sat next door (all 9 of us in one room) and had a lengthy talk on the microphones, XLR cable, how it works and other equipment. Our bones fused together during the length of this talk, and we snapped them back to individual pieces after awaking and standing up (it felt like that in any case). I was growing quickly tired soon after, maybe from lack of proper sleep, and had a headache pinching around. Worse yet, I didn't have anyone to partner up with due to odd numbers and Chinese James not turning up (curious since, as one student assured Ron, he's not the sort to miss any session)

The pairs, yet again, had to voice act different scenes. By default, one person would be in the recording section and deliver the lines - pausing in between each one, while the partner would work with the equipment and software next door. Each pair would switch over, and edit the recordings for refinement on any hiccups, or general polishing.

The star performance was the duo Manjit and the other guy (who played the Witch in our group earlier this morning). They both had to voice in the same room due to time constraints; I could tell who the chap was at the time, it was obvious from his tone, but I honestly had NO IDEA Manjit was in there voice acting as well. I thought the guy was voice-acting two separate characters at once! I felt like a stupid ass but I couldn't stop laughing regarding how their characters played out. It was genuine - not perfect on a professional scale - but solid delivery on both their parts. I wished I offered them my USB stick to save the recording file onto, I'd listen to it again. :(

I ran back to grab mine, incidentally, towards the end of today. We were suppose to finish at 3:00 but carried on until 4:40. I pulled myself together and found a partner to voice with me the script Ron gave me. I chose one of the girls who looked 'right' for the role. I asked her a pretty big demand - not only did I give her the character with bigger sizes in lines (including one that is close to a paragraph) but also requested she delivered the dialogue in relentlessly fast speeds to fit the part. It was getting late in the afternoon, she was tired by this stage, and I didn't expect her to do it. Besides that, we didn't even get much time to REHEARSE the script.

When it came to recording though, she really pulled through with it and filled in my requests. I was amazed by this, especially when I was being a selfish prick and having my character display nearly no emotion at all (in a case of deliberate contrast between the two). Apparently, previous groups cottoned on to the idea of character 'H' being fast-paced too but my partner did a better job at keeping it consistent. When it came to fixing up the recordings, the partner's tongue slipped on a few cases and repeated a line (in all fairness, as it was a lack of practice and fast-talking) but it was all good regardless. I promised I'd buy her a Subway sometime - she wanted it to be this Thursday. (because our lecture is in fact taking place 10 minutes away or so from University) Sure thing!! She deserves it.

Before we departed, Andy Joules popped in to see how we were doing. He mentioned that one us needs to help out a student that has to record her lines another day - it's actually Su. I jumped at the offer, in regards to helping her with English and all.

We headed our separate ways. I waltzed over to Waitrose for some snacks, and giant bin liners for the...giant bin. Getting back, Georgia brought up that the bin liners have to be attained from the porters lodge as they are BIO-DEGRADABLE. Yup, it's a health nature recycling candy-cane field scheme here and the fact I accidentally wasted £3.15 is clearly a good reason to berate this notion. Nonetheless, I emptied the contents of the bin into one of my liners anyway since some dumb-fucks decided to lob rubbish into the bin despite it lacking a liner.

Made some tea and rested for a little bit. At 7:15pm I put on some cottage pie. PJ was up there, and we all doodled a little bit. I saw a little bit more of Sophie when she gets 'riled' up. Noticeably, Yannis wanted to look at what Sophie was eating in regards to the box she was holding. Despite her saying it was Aunt Bestie's Snail in a Hole or something (Ew, what the FUCK) Yannis blankly wanted to look at the package anyway and tried to get the empty box off Sophie. She boiled up and yanked it back away from his man-hands, loudly stating it "is Snail in a Hole, look see, there's the fucking picture!" She didn't mean it literally (she goes straight back to normal humour side) but I can't really get why she couldn't just give him the box anyway rather than forcing him to take her word for it. I guess Yannis might of planned to doodle on it.

Cottage pie was nice, and glad I can have some nice cold glasses of orange juice again. PJ disappeared shortly after using Sophie's laptop to edit a movie on iMovie for re-uploading (I think), and I went off to shower. Just after finishing, and drying up in the shower room, I could hear Rob and Yannis making bizarre, noisy 'calls' from outside in the communal area. I responded to some of it, and we had a mutual monkey calling session going on for a bit. I came out, dressing gown and all, yet Rob had believed I was in my room. Shower Room is next door, and all.