Talking about audiobook production to high-schoolers

[Leni]

So, I have been invited to talk about audiobooks and audiobook making in a High School. It will be a 9 hour course, offered as an extra activity for a group of about 15 high schoolers, who will be able to choose this course among others - so I expect them to be interested and motivated. I will not talk about LibriVox except in passing, because at the end of the course one of the teachers, who is organizing this, will work with the students and they will record their own audiobook, under their own guidelines, and the school will publish it, so the recordings will not come to LV (which is a blessing, I did not want to have to deal with copyright issues, parental permission etc.). I will do the theoretical part, explaining what an audiobook is, the purpose, how to choose a reading, how to read, etc.. I don't feel like the best person to do this, honestly, but... helping a friend. Has anybody else done anything similar? Any hints or materials I could use (I am already drawing inspiration from the Wiki)? Any ideas, experiences or impressions are greatly appreciated.

[tovarisch]

Visit Youtube and search for "voice over" in conjunction with "advice" or "tutorial", you will find tons of useful and useless stuff. Most of the useful stuff falls into two distinct categories - how to read and what equipment/software to use (and how). The "how to read" stuff also falls into two categories of its own: right and wrong. For instance, I heard advice to breathe in through your nose! And that was supposedly an accomplished narrator... Guess, which category this falls into.

[Carolin]

Visit the what if i suck thread. Probably thats a question on a lot of minds

[Penumbra]

One use of audiobooks that we don't really talk about here is recording specifically for the blind. I believe it is the case that typical recording for the blind places are very much word perfect oriented, especially if the book is a textbook. Math and science books are particularly interesting when they contain formulae to be described. I looked into doing this once and found out that I would be doing PL for 6 months before I could record anything for them.

You might ask your friend if the emphasis is on recording in general or recording for the blind in particular.