Portfolio Project: Mom's first cold read (video)

This is a video of my mom doing a cold read for the first time the day after I finished writing the script she's going to be reading from. She was so excited because her dream was always to be a news broadcaster and work with journalism because has her degree in communications so this is definitely her forte. I told her that the audio has to at the maximum, 2 minutes and 10 seconds because I can't go over that because her voiceover is the narration of the entire film opening.

This was an impromptu cold read and I wasn't planning on recording it and doing a blog about a cold read at all, but here we are. All I did was hand her my computer with the rough draft of my script on it and she was so enthusiastic about it she goes "can I do a could read?" and I agreed because why not! I grabbed my phone and recorded this take. I'm going to have to record more takes because this was the first one and because the tone in which she's giving the report is not the right one I'm envisioning for the voiceover. The way she read it was very upbeat and energetic but that's because that's how her personality is so she's used to speaking that way and because I gave her no direction at all, it didn't sound the way I'd like it to. I'm going to work with her on it more so that she knows what I'm going for and we can do this together!

I asked for her opinion on somethings like if I should film her giving the report and have her news broadcast playing on the Tv screen to portray a real news report but she said she liked my second option. My second option was to have her news report audio playing as a voiceover only and use this as the narration of all the shots that are occurring during certain parts of the opening. I'm not sure if I phrased that correctly but it makes sense to me and it will make more sense once I draw the storyboard.

This is only the first take of the voiceover and I have to actually direct her and let her know how I want her news broadcast to sound. We're going to meet and spend a lot more time figuring out her tonality, inflections, etc. so that the overall tone of the voiceover and the visuals don't clash together. I'll keep you updated on how this process goes! See you in the next blog!