Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Featured App in ARTS/TECH

Script Rehearser

We believe that life is short and it’s always good to step outside your comfort zone. If you’ve never jumped out of an airplane with a parachute or been the center of a dance party or made an absolute fool of yourself from time to time then you’re not taking much risk in life. You have to sometimes play a bit risky in life, in poker, and in relationships and business to get better returns. One of the things that some of our staff did was take up new art classes, dancing classes and also an acting class. It is really quite bold to audition for an acting gig and basically sell yourself as the product versus when you sell a vacuum cleaner, a used car, or a stack of encyclopedia. But ultimately you’re putting your skill set on display. And one way as an actor you can put your skills on display is to rehearse and practice techniques as well as your lines.

We found a great app in the Google Play store. I personally used this to try to rehearse for a Godzilla parody film that was being done locally. It is great for loading text scripts you may get as well as in some cases certain PDF’s even. It recognized the characters and direction and marked up the text even. And then it allows you to hear text to speech lines read back to you or prompt you. It can read all the lines, or just one particular character’s lines if you want. You can also go into your language settings to change the accent. It can beep or prompt you before the lines and also vary its pauses between lines.

I found this especially a great tool because in college I took some theater classes and had to rehearse for a script and at the time all I had was a Dell Inspiron laptop and also used programs like Peter’s Ultimate Alarm Clock which had a text to speech interface to speak back lines. Adobe also had the ability to do so. I also read my lines into Audacity, an audio recording program and then let it read back the script lines I had recorded so it would prompt myself the lines. Then in order to continuously practice I just left it on looped play back. You can do this sometimes when trying to create audition tapes as well. I used this to rehearse for a play called Beyond Therapy. If you are from the old school of technology you can alternatively use a cassette tape recorder or a device like a digital Olympus recorder. I actually did buy a digital voice recorder at the time but it didn’t have an mp3 transfer tool to the computer so I had to hook a male to male connector adapter wire to be able to play it from one device to another to do this. It was tedious but it got the job done. Nowadays there are all sorts of great tools for students.

Script Rehearser is free and requires Android 4.0 and up and is about 14 Megabytes in size.
It has an option to record audio and is completely free with no ads, no paid upgrades or random payments. You can import most scripts or lines as well as PDF’s regardless of it being on a PC or MAC.
You can add notes and stage directions to your script. You can fast forward with a few navigation buttons to the next cue. It works also for tablets. You can also pause the script readings or just listen along.
It comes with a few sample audio files too.

I really like this program.

Are you an actor or student dealing with multimedia files and audio? What creative solutions did you come up with to help you in your studies? Let us know!