Category — Audio Production

I’ve recent­ly been doing some work record­ing voiceovers for a Treet.tv pro­duc­tion for the British Library. Treet.tv — for­mer­ly SLCN — is the Aus­tralian vir­tu­al world media com­pa­ny that we work with on the week­ly Design­ing Worlds show on vir­tu­al world design and designers.

The pro­duc­tion doc­u­ments aspects of the British Library’s Dig­i­tal Lives Project, a major study of “per­son­al dig­i­tal col­lec­tions”. The project includ­ed a major inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence that was held both in Sec­ond Life and real life, and the pro­duc­tion includes cov­er­age of the con­fer­ence and com­ments from participants.

We’re very pleased to report that City of Sun­der­land Col­lege have com­mis­sioned us to do a sec­ond series of our pop­u­lar iPhys Dig­i­tal Revi­sion Notes in Biol­o­gy and Phys­i­ol­o­gy — this time on Biol­o­gy topics.

The first set of 23 pod­casts (or mini-pro­grammes or seg­ments, what­ev­er you would like to call them) cov­ered a set of Phys­i­ol­o­gy top­ics and was start­ed last Sep­tem­ber. We com­plet­ed it recent­ly, nice­ly in time for stu­dents to use them in revi­sion for upcom­ing exam­i­na­tions. The series can be down­loaded from the course web site. As they include pro­duc­tion library music (they would have been rather bor­ing oth­er­wise) they required a PRS/MCPS pod­cast­ing licence but this was very afford­able thanks to the num­ber of items, the num­ber of stu­dents and the fact that the dis­tri­b­u­tion is known.

Now we have the go-ahead for anoth­er set of around the same size, this time cov­er­ing a sim­i­lar num­ber of Biol­o­gy top­ics. Once again they will be writ­ten by Lynne Hardy and Car­ol Whalen Grif­fiths, and we hope to have them writ­ten and record­ed in time for the new aca­d­e­m­ic year in September.

We’ll be select­ing a new set of music beds for the new series and in con­trast with the electronic/contemporary feel of the iPhys beds, we may choose some­thing a lit­tle more organ­ic for the new series.

What we do need to do is to think about what to call them. They could still be part of  “iPhys”, which might be just as well, as “iBio” does­n’t quite roll off the tongue so well…

In 2008, I was com­mis­sioned by City of Sun­der­land Col­lege to pro­duce a series of Dig­i­tal Revi­sion Notes for Phys­i­ol­o­gy and Biol­o­gy stu­dents. These would be made avail­able on the course VLE sys­tem for down­load as pod­casts by stu­dents as an adjunct to writ­ten and oth­er online mate­ri­als that could be lis­tened to on the way to, from and between class­es or at home.

We decid­ed to call the first, Phys­i­ol­o­gy, stage of the project “iPhys” (well, why not) and as a result the depart­ment came up with twen­ty draft scripts (we had to split a long one, so this became 21), cov­er­ing such top­ics as Enzymes, Gas Exchange and the Lungs, Home­osta­sis & Hor­mones, and so on.

I decid­ed to approach these in the same style as “The Book”, as played by Peter Jones in Dou­glas Adams’s The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy, pre­sent­ing the infor­ma­tion over a nice syn­the­sised music bed to avoid the pre­sen­ta­tions being too dry and tech­ni­cal, so I drew exten­sive­ly on music from EMI Music’s KPM Pro­duc­tion Music Library, for­mer­ly an employ­er of mine, and par­tic­u­lar­ly music by Dave Vorhaus, whose mate­r­i­al may be famil­iar to view­ers of Chan­nel 4’s Night Gallery some years ago. In addi­tion, I used some more recent pieces by oth­er com­posers. Each seg­ment has a stan­dard out­ro with a theme tune.

The ben­e­fit of using pro­duc­tion library music (rather than com­mer­cial music) for a project like this is that you don’t need a sep­a­rate PPL (Phono­graph­ic Per­for­mances Ltd) licence to cov­er the use with the record com­pa­ny: all that was required in this case was a Pod­cast licence under the PRS LOEL (Lim­it­ed Online Exploita­tion Licence), the fee for which is based on the num­ber of pieces of music times the num­ber of lis­ten­ers. With the num­ber of lis­ten­ers being known and lim­it­ed to enrolled course stu­dents, we came in well under the required max­i­mum num­ber of  “streams” to qual­i­fy for the low­est annu­al fee: a very rea­son­able amount.

Each top­ic runs for about five min­utes. I start­ed off with a pilot record­ing to fine-tune the con­cept, and once we had made a few minor changes the project was giv­en the go-ahead. I’ve com­plet­ed 17 of the seg­ments so far and the reac­tion has been excel­lent: we are already plan­ning sim­i­lar projects for oth­er departments.

As a spe­cial treat for the stu­dents we gave them a sea­son­al gift of a read­ing, with appro­pri­ate eerie music, of a Vic­to­ri­an ghost story.

Much as we would like to give you an exam­ple here, the licens­ing arrange­ment does­n’t let us. How­ev­er we will hap­pi­ly tell you more if you are inter­est­ed in a sim­i­lar project. Just con­tact us.