[Rebecca] The Last Weekend of Editing!

The Talent Quest web site wasn't feeling very well this past weekend, which happened to be the last few days I had for editing. So, I liveblogged the process over on Skepchick! Here it is.

7pm
Coming down to the wire, the pilot is almost finished! Thanks again for all your suggestions for show names, slogans, and neurosurgeons. (It turns out, I don't need a neurosurgeon after all. Whee, last minute changes!) We're editing everything together tonight and fine-tuning it, and it's sounding great. A lot of the show is made up of interviews, as well as some recording out and about at the psychic fair, but then there's a lot of voice over work to do. In the grand scheme of things, doing the voice overs really isn't that difficult. I've already written the bulk of what I'm saying, and whenever I flub I can just do another take. The thing is, the more I do it, the more I become hyper-aware of how I say every word. And the more I think about what I'm saying, the more I screw up even the simplest sentences. Here's a list of all the things I do that annoy me, most of which I knew about before and have tried (and failed) to eradicate:

I start every sentence with "So"
So I go to this psychic fair. So I talk this girl. So monkeys are funny. So I sooooo need to stop doing this. Just to give you an idea, while writing this entry I've written and deleted the word "so" at the beginning of a sentence at least seven times.

I pop my "P"s
Popping is when you hear a "puh" in the speakers whenever there's a P. I don't do it on every P, just the important ones. Retake!

I can't say the letter "T"
My tireless editor John just pointed this one out. I knew it, but haven't thought about it in ages -- I believe it to be a relic of my South Jersey accent.* The very first line of the show requires me to stress the word "lot," as in, "a lot of BS." But I don't say "lot." I say "LAH" with a throaty stop thing at the end. In a more severe case, when I read the word "written" above in my head, it sounds like "RIH-en." I'm not sure how else to describe it, so maybe a linguist can leave a comment below with clarification.

So (I'm leaving that one in), I redid the first sentence of the show about a dozen times. "A LAH...crap." "A LOTTTTT.....oh that sounds forced." "A LOTTTT.....CRAP!" Finally I changed it to "a TON," and then still had to record about a dozen more takes because then I couldn't say the word "percentage" anymore. I changed that to "statistics" and now we're done that. That, meaning, the very first line of the show. HA!

I got a little frustrated with all this going on, and of course everything was caught on tape. Click here to listen to a very amusing clip.

I'll update this entry as the night wears on...gotta go for now, the Mexican take-out guy just got here!

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9:50pm
We're still editing the A section of the show. After our rough cut of the show last weekend, we found we were over our time limit. There's a clock you have to follow to get on public radio, with breaks in very specific places for station announcements and such. There are a few different clocks, though, and using a different one gets us more time in A and less time in C (the last section), which is exactly what we need.

So now, of course, we come up a little short in A. Whoops! Listening through, though, we came up with some really good ideas that both improve the show dramatically AND use up more time. Sweet! We've just now hit our mark exactly.

Here's an additional item that annoys me about myself:

My voice changes as the night wears on
I started much higher, and when I went back to add some lines to the script, it didn't match. Like, by a lot. A LAH-TTTTA. So I had to rerecord even more in my new, deeper, sexier voice. Well, deeper at least.

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9:57pm
Now A is over time again by one second...

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9:58pm
Okay we're on time again....

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10:25pm
Starting on the B section now, which is one full interview that you guys are going to love. The only tweaking that needs to be done is with intros, outros, and music. I'm happy because I think we can fit in one of my favorite songs. Here's a list of what music is going in (subject to change!):

Walking in the Snow with Russians by Ice Core Scientist
Alpha Beta Gaga by Air
Dark Eyes by Devotchka
Sleeper Agent by Hallelujah the Hills
Pink Batman by Don Deacon

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10:27pm
John is cursing :(

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11:18pm
Screeching halt. Major problem. Oh noes.

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11:36pm
There appears to be some confusion as to what the show's structure needs to be. We were hoping to get the show finished by tomorrow morning, but that's looking . . . unlikely. Time for bed.

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