For the fourth Chapter of my audio drama, I wanted the scene to be acted rather than described by the narrator. This scene being the climax of the story taking place in the hotel. I originally wanted this scene to play out in 5.1 with each character taking a point of the triangle created by the centre channel and the left and right surround channel. however, in practice, I could not get it to sound quite how I wanted with the atmos of foley tracks as well. So I instead opted to create a binaural mix of the scene making use of the Dear VR plugin that we explored in Gareth’s Spatial sound sessions. I automated sounds of footsteps and movements of the characters around the listener using the binaural pan to immerse the listener within the scene.
For the voice actors, I used myself as multiple different voices such as the people in the bar area, as well as the barman and Jack. Rosie played Celeste and Micheal (Technician) played the Sherrif and my partner Sam as the voice for Emmeline. I think the biggest challenge for this scene was to make my voice sound different enough for each Character so the listener wouldn’t become confused between each character. I resolved this (hopefully) by using slight pitch effects to my voice to change them just enough to sound distinct. Placement of the characters around the binaural field also helped to distinguish each character for the listener.