My dad's show is done! I think it went off well. My dad did a really good job of sounding spontaneous; most of his dialogue was written in advance, which I don't think was at all obvious from listening. He also did a good job of responding off-the-cuff to my followup questions, none of which he knew about in advance. I think the prepared statements and the spontaneous conversation were pretty much seamless.
In one place I sprung something on him: I knew he was going to talk about how they used to listen to William Joyce, a British fascist who went to Germany and broadcast anti-British propaganda, sort of like the Tokyo Rose of Western Europe. I knew he was going to talk about this, and so I found a recording of one of Joyce's broadcasts, and also the broadcast from the BBC the day the British entered Hamburg and captured Joyce's recording studio. And I didn't tell my dad about this in advance because I wanted his spontaneous reaction & I knew it wouldn't sound the same if he knew it was coming. Anyway, to my surprise my dad actually remembered the incident Joyce described in his broadcast and was able to explain what it was about. I was like, "wait a minute, you're the one who's supposed to be surprised!"
There was only one flub, which hopefully wasn't too awful -- at one point early on I cued up the wrong track. So instead of playing a song, it went right into the talkset which was intended for the end of the show. Whoops! It took me a few seconds to figure out what was going on, just long enough to hear me say "You're listening to WXDU Durham and in honor of Memorial Day, I'm talking with my dad about his memories of the war," and then I stopped it and skipped forward to the music that was supposed to play then. I hope it sounded intentional, like I was doing a station ID or something. Considering some of the goofs I've made on the air, I think it's a pretty good show when that's the worst mistake.
I have a question for anyone to listened to the show: Did you think the instrumental music under the talksets added something to the dialogue, was neutral, or detracted from it? I got a comment after the show from someone saying they found it a distraction. It seemed fine to me but I'm used to it, because I do that (play low instrumental music) in all my own talksets. When I first started doing Divaville Lounge last summer, I heard from a long-time listener that they liked the music, thought it was a nice change, and then I haven't heard anything since. So I'm interested in hearing what others think. I'm definitely not going to play music under the talksets next week, because there will already be 2 layers of sound: the translation in English and the Italian original underneath it. Adding music to that would be a mess.
In terms of the on-air experience, this was the most boring show I have ever done. Most weeks Divaville Lounge is a flurry of constant activity. Because the songs are all so short, and I don't do much planning in advance -- sometimes I bring a short list of songs I want to work in, but usually not even that. So in a typical show I spend the entire two hours thinking, "what would sound good after this song that's playing right now? I have 1 minute 45 seconds to figure that out, find it, and cue it up! Make that 1 minute 30, and counting!" Which I used to find very stressful, but after 10 months I guess I've gotten used to it and now it's kind of fun.
Today was the complete opposite. All the work was done in advance. I had a flowsheet with the entire show planned out, and a small case with about a dozen CDs containing all the songs I needed. All I had to do was stick in the next CD, and then check the song off on the flowsheet. And the tracks were so long that there wasn't even much of that to do! I've never spent so much time sitting around. In most shows I never have time to sit down at all.
In terms of audio editing I took Santa Salsera's advice and didn't try to make it quite so polished as last time. Last time I tried to cut out every single um, false start and repeated word. Santa Salsera told me she leaves in every third um, or every fourth, to retain the flow of natural speech. I think she has a point that if the dialogue is made too artificially perfect, it can sound sterile. So I followed her advice and didn't work so hard to clip out all the ums. Mostly this was just giving myself permission to leave in the hard ones: sometimes they're really easy to get rid of and sometimes quite difficult. And I think it sounds worse to make it choppy, like a bad reality show, than to leave in the occasional um. Also I did less editing at the points when the conversation got serious. Because I noticed that NPR shows do that: the dialogue is generally very clean, but then when someone is talking about something emotionally charged they pause more, say um and even stammer a bit. I think looser editing helps to convey the person's state of mind.
Now I'm taking the night off and relaxing (it's a great day on TCM: war movies all day and Sinatra all night), and then tomorrow I hope I'll have everything to get started on next week's show. Which will be a whole new kind of editing -- layering the two languages together -- and I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes. Georg helped me work on the written translation yesterday. It's quite good although there were a couple of things we didn't quite understand & had to ask for clarification on. Just a few odd word choices. Like for instance, Signor Bucca said that Mussolini visited his school, and was surrounded by fawning "hierarchs." I'm assuming that meant bureaucrats and/or fascist party officials and I want to make sure.
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