Studio Session 29/04/13

Today we had our first recording session with Angela and Ian. We were intending on recording a full cast, however our extras were unable to attend. We set out with the initial plan of using the rehearse record method; breaking the script into scenes and rehearsing them a number of times until we were happy with the performance. We expected to get around half of the play recorded today.

Unfortunately from arrival we had some issues which set us back; the studio i/o had been changed and we could not get any sound coming from the system. Eventually we figured out the problem, however at this point I felt quite under pressure and I felt this had an impact on my directing performance.

Thankfully our performers were very good; they already had a good grasp of their roles and after a couple of rehearsal read through's we decided to record.

During recording I read the additional parts in an attempt to aid the natural flow of the performance. The performances were great; Angela and Ian made very few mistakes and I was extremely pleased with their rendition of the characters.
During recording we had some more technical issues; the Mac froze on us during recording on two occasions causing us to lose some takes.
In all we ran through the script about 5 times and by the end of it we had 3 full complete recordings of Archie and Chrissie's parts which we were confident we would be able to build the play with.

The whole recording phase was over in under 4 hours, Ian and Angela have offered to join us during the remaining sessions if there is anything we feel needs to be rerecorded.

The remainder of the session was spent cutting up the various tracks into segments (scenes, character lines, etc.)

I was very happy with the outcome of today's recording session, I felt the dialogue we captured was of extremely good quality; the parts were well acted, plosives and other issues such as sibilance were minimal. The actors worked well together in portraying their roles and I was very surprised how quickly we managed to get the parts recorded; another similar project I was involved in previously took a lot longer to get through and there was not even half the amount of dialogue to record.

In regards to my directorial performance, I was not so pleased; I had let the pressure of technical difficulties get to me, causing me to forget to use my previous recording plans-

• I was intending on recording performers in the positions characters would be in (eg. seated), instead they were recorded standing throughout. 
• The performers were positioned arms length from their microphones throughout (Neumann U87), while this is ideal for the majority of the production, I wanted to record Archie's thoughts at the beginning and the end of the play from a closer position. 

I accept it is my fault these procedures were not followed but I think it would be wrong to ask Ian to come in again due to this alone; he traveled a long way for no payment and the quality of the performance/recordings were great.