Suitable for framing

[zvi]

What makes a story podficcable? What makes a story not podficcable?

Two kinds of stories that I have noticed have a high difficulty level for podficcing

1) Anything with multiple pov characters. It seems quite difficult for single readers to make the speaking choices they make for dialogue match the speaking choices they make for internal narration or close third person omniscient. And what happens as a listener is that I can sometimes lose track of who the narrator is, which is, usually, pretty important to the story in a story with multiple pov.

2) Stories with words from or derived from Earth-based non-English languages. The worst, for me, is when someone who does not know French is mangling French, but I assume that people who know Latin, Chinese, or Spanish have also been faced with a lot (a lot) of cringing. For me, it isn't so awful when the accent is terrible, but when the word is simply pronounced wrong, that gets to me. (French is really bad for this, as the pronunciation rules for French loan words in American English are not the same at all as the pronunciation rules for French.)

I have noticed that light-hearted stories leave me less demanding as a listener. (I don't know if they're actually any easier to record, maybe they're really hard because you keep cracking yourself up.) But if a story is humor, or a straightforward, light-hearted first time, or adorable kidfic, my whole approach to listening is much more accepting of mistakes or lack of nuance from a reader.

What about you? As a reader, what makes a podfic easy or more difficult for you to read? As a listener, what sorts of stories have you learned to be wary of in the mouth of a new reader?

Comments

[anatsuno]

eek, I must've gotten to you a number of times pronouncing loan words from French the French way then - I try not to do it, but sometimes I cannot help myself. *g*

*will ponder the question and come back*

[zvi]

It actually doesn't bother me 1/10th as much in reverse. I'm not sure why.

[inalasahl]

As a listener, what sorts of stories have you learned to be wary of in the mouth of a new reader?
Any story that in written form relies solely on paragraph breaks to indicate changes in who's speaking during sections of dialogue.

[dodificus]

Yes, this. Except I'm coming from a reader's POV. The only story I've ever asked permission to record and then not actually recorded was one where there was whole conversations of dialogue with no narrative or he said/she said. It's possible that someone out there could make that work but I'm not that person.

[zvi]

Out of curiousity, how much he said/she said is enough? Do you just need a little narrative to make the switch, or should it be a couple of sentences?

[dodificus]

Out of *my* curiosity I just went back and checked the fic in question to see what exactly the dialogue was like. It was all short, sharp sentences with tiny, sparse narrative to make the switch (when there was any narrative at all between dialogue). I think that for it to work for me I would need longer dialogue (closer to a monologue than a short question/observation/answer exchange) OR I'd need more narrative in between, a couple of sentences at least.

But this only applies when the dialogue exchange is a loooong one and the padding between is consistently absent. I just know my strengths and I'm much better at narrative than dialogue, especially when I have to differentiate voices with no help from the author:)

[torachan]

Oh man, that just made me wonder if there's podfic for animanga/jdrama/jpop fandoms (it seems to be a pretty western media phenomenon so far). I shudder to think... Just the character names alone would probably make it really difficult to do well.

[zvi]

There's some on audiofic (although, I confess, when I said Chinese I was thinking of Firefly). I wouldn't be surprised that if there's more, it might be on different comms or a different archive. Popslash has a separate archive, I know.

[lunate8]

At one time I'd considered recording a Naruto story, having a passing familiarity with the anime, but I talked myself out of it pretty quickly. I don't know Japanese and I'm not active in the show's on-line fandom, so I figured I would get self-conscious about my pronounciation of certain nouns and names. The English-dubbed show would have been my aural reference since that's the one I've watched, and I wondered if imitating that would jar or irritate listeners.

[darkemeralds]

Stories with complex visual structures (which are rare) make impossible going in podfic. I originally set out to do Speranza's "Kowalski Is Bleeding" for Podbang, but quickly realized that while I might have managed the alternating POV, there was no way I could embed it the way it's visually embedded in the written version. It was almost laid out in a table, with simultaneous narratives in adjacent cells.) I gave it up, sadly. It's a FANTASTIC Due South story.

(It also had a couple of longish sections of Spanish in it, but for that I was going to hire a friend!)

Clearly, the easiest kind of fic to be successful at is a linear story in a single point of view, and the farther the narrative deviates from that, the more challenging it gets to record.

While I don't love hearing languages (or place names) I know mispronounced, I don't have nearly as much trouble with that as I do with, say, general sloppy enunciation.

[zvi]

I wonder if you could do some kind of choral or in the round arrangement to mimic something like Kowalski is Bleeding?

[darkemeralds]

Wow! What an idea!

Hm. One wouldn't sing it, but it would take two decidedly different voices--probably different enough to require two people. It would take either some amazing direction, or some pretty fancy editing...

You've got me thinking! Wow, cool!

[luzula]

I think you mean Scrabble? Kowalski Is Bleeding has no unusual visual structure as far as I remember. Anyway, I think one could do that if one had streaming audio on a website. One could have one file for each cell, so that the listener could skip around and click on the one they wanted. And preferably have one reader for Fraser and one for Kowalski. It would probably be a lot of work, though, and the listener would be stuck by the computer--the podfic wouldn't be portable.

[darkemeralds]

No, the Scrabble story, as well as a handful of Speranza's other stories (Hanged Man, and one whose title I can't recall that was laid out entirely in a table, with Ray's POV in one column and Fraser's in the other) would have been downright impossible to podfic, at least to my mind.

Kowalksi is Bleeding has insertions of Fraser's POV at several important points throughout the story. It's told from Vecchio's POV primarily, but the bits where Fraser is remembering something he isn't telling Ray are inset into the text, and critical to the plot. Both are in first person, too. It would take some significant acting chops to make that distinction with voice alone--more than I felt I could muster.

[luzula]

Oh yeah, now I remember. I tend to print out stories for reading, and I remember that one confused me at first, because when I copied the text into Word, the Fraser-POV bits got inserted into the regular text without any separation.

I actually like doing stories with shifting POV, if the shifts are marked clearly, and since I mostly record stuff from Fraser or Kowalski POV, I've worked out narrative voices for them which I think are easily distinguishable (though I'm not good at Vecchio POV). But it'd be more difficult to do when Fraser's POV is meant to be what Fraser's thinking about at that particular point in the story (at least that's the way I interpret it). Yeah, I'd probably have chosen something else, too.

I guess the essential problem is that listening to a sound file is one-dimensional (you're moving from start to finish, at a fixed speed), while reading a story on a screen is two-dimensional (your eyes can move over all of the flat surface, and aren't constrained to move in a particular direction).

Hanged Man has been recorded by nos4a2no9 (it's on the archive). I don't think the text has any unusual visual structure, although it does have pictures. (Scrabble is the one that's entirely in a table.)