Image: Peyri on Flickr.
Dan Conway spent fifteen years working in mainstream computer animation, first with Animal Logic, and ultimately as the head of animation production for TVCs at Illoura in Melbourne.
For the past five years, he has been running his own company, 2Large Productions and writing scripts as well. With his background in animation, they tend to require substantial Hollywood budgets. The script for Sweet Dreams, for instance, has been around at least since 2010 and is budgeted at around $40m.
‘I really wanted to hear Sweet Dreams [out loud] as I had played it over and over in my head so many times I didn’t have a sense of how it played,’ he explained. The normal solution is a table read. Here, ‘The writer can be as objective as possible and go back and rewrite on the basis of how it sounds.’
The animation/post production/TVC part of his brain led him to a truly improbable solution. What if writers could format the script as a PDF and feed it to an application which would then read the script back in real human actors’ voices? A table read in your telephone?
Eight months and three people’s technical dedication led to an app called Tableread, which is due to be launched in a few weeks.
‘It is based on formatting because scripts have very tight formatting,’ he said. ‘It knows where the dialogue is, and the scene changes are. It reads the names, knows the most important characters, works out the sexes and assigns them a voice.’
It is loaded with forty voices, which can be adjusted according to mood so a character can be happy, or sad or confused…. but can’t change that feeling through the story. Once depressed, always depressed.
It also comes with 23 different music tracks to convey different emotions, and will read standardised words like gunshot to provide the sound effect.
The voices are electronically synthesised, and thirty of them sound natural, at least to an animator. The rest are a bit robotic, but they are not likely to be major characters, unless they are supposed to be computers. Conway is careful to say that it doesn’t replace a real table read, but it provides an additional tool with its own potential uses.
One obvious value is the displacement it creates. Once a script has worn grooves in a writers’ head, the mechanical reading takes it sideways so it can be experienced in a new way. It can be played to collaborators who can listen without having to read a character.
Dan Conway maintains this is a new, convenient pathway to reach producers. Bored executive, plus long drive to work, plus app equals a kind of podcast, much easier to absorb than one more in a mountain of scripts at the desk. What is more, he argues, the audio allows the story to be judged on its emotions rather than its literal words. ‘We are really sending the experience of the script, not the script,’ he said.
He also claims it is of direct value to actors. The script can be played with gaps for a specified part, so the performer can learn the lines by inserting them in between the cues. It can also be used to help performers to feel themselves into the part in pre-production, while other crew members can painlessly absorb the full story of a film.
If this version works, Conway will continue to develop the software. He can hire name actors for a concentrated week, record large amounts of their spoken words and use them as the basis for key functions, like narrating the Big Print.
He will add more music, and allow the writer to customise the emotions, so they develop through a story. Ultimately a writer should be able to mark up a script for delivery, create music and sound cues, introduce pauses and excitement, and generally control the rhythm. All this along with notes from various recipients, can be loaded into the metadata for the PDF.
How close can he get to realistic? That is an open question, and slightly beside the point. Radio is not composed of normal voices, and we are happy to accept the conventions of spoken word drama. The point is only to create a portal so the story and its emotional journey can be shared painlessly, in ways that fit into the time frame of the users.
Are table reads a useful tool? Opinion varies widely about their value. Some writers argue that they only work because they can hear the emotion come into their work while actors say their feedback can be valuable. Some script executives believe that performed reads divert attention from the underlying structure and provide false confidence to defensive writers. ‘We played it out and everyone liked it so why are you objecting now?’
It does raise intriguing questions about the evolving power of computers. Will writers ultimately be able to create a radio performance of their work from standardised elements? Is this a useful way of creating books for people with vision impairments? Can a convincing aural performance be synthesised with enough recorded dialogue?
It may well be that all performances are composed from a finite number of emotive sounds and words, which are standard to a particular voice, and can be adjusted for pace, pause, rhythm and pitch.
It is not surprising that this idea comes from an animator. In that world, films start with the performed soundtrack.
An introduction to the app, with a processed script, is already available on the net. It is downloadable for free, but will cost $3/month to use.
