Editing, proofing and pick-ups

P2P student team member James has supplied today's picture for our journal. James tells us:

When we record with voice actors, it's important to ensure that we make the most of our time with them. At the end of every day of recording for this project, we have been checking the recordings against the script to pick up any obvious errors. The next day, we present a list of these 'pick-ups' to team leader David. He will make sure that retakes of the relevant lines are made. This process sometimes requires me to sit with the actor, go through the pick-ups, and offer advice on pronunciations and diction to rectify the mistakes made during the initial recording.

When editing pick-ups for the final version for the podcast, I also check these against the script. If there are still issues with these takes, we must arrange another recording session for further pick-ups. In the case of Lorna's diary of the war and her poems, the historical language and non-English words and passages means that the script can be a challenging text for our actors to read.

Shown here is a typical view of my screen during work on pick-ups. I use an Excel spreadsheet to track the editing status of recordings. I also have the script at hand to check against recordings, and another spreadsheet to track the amended pick-ups in rerecordings.