Chairman's Chatter

Howard Bagshaw ARPS, MPAGB

We like to think of ourselves, essentially, as an aspect of photography, and perhaps treat the sound track as secondary. This was brought home to me, yet again, at the inaugural Smethwick National AV Competition, where some otherwise excellent AVs were let down by less effective sound. It wasn’t the case for the very well-deserved winner, “Safe” by Judith Kimber (report in the next issue of AV News) who, as I’m sure most of you will realise, is so capable that she writes and performs the music for her productions. However most of us tend to rely on commercial music and selfrecorded narration. Some are better than others at narration, but I was impressed at a recent talk by John Smith about how he made the intro sequence for the Great Northern. In addition to the elaborate graphics, he used computer generated voices throughout the production, and being John (short arms, deep pockets), he found a free service, called ‘Vocalware’. (www.vocalware.com/index/demo ). With a good selection of voices, the software converts your typed text straight into the spoken word. There’s a free demo available and it’s also great fun, even if you don’t use it for an AV. Others, unhappy with their own voices, have used a service called Fiverr (www.verr.com ). In this case, professional voice-over artists will narrate your text, often at a very inexpensive rate (some will do 50 words for just over £4 –i.e. $5, hence the name).

As for music, most have the IAC licences which allow us to use commercial music in our productions, though with signicant limitations on how and where we show the AV. Along with several other AV producers, I have tried using royalty-free music.

There are a number of useful sources on the internet, though I have found one site, ‘Incompetech’ (www.incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ ), particularly fruitful. All the music on the site has been composed and performed by Kevin MacLeod and is indexed on the site either alphabetically or by genres. You may nd you can use a complete track; I think that Alan Tyrer did this for “The Gallery”, or you can piece together sections to suit, which I did for “Kelpies”. Of course, other free royalty-free music is available on line, or can be bought from rms such as AKM Music and Beckham Digital. Just remember that, unlike the IAC licences, you will probably have to credit the music somewhere in your production.