To the concerns of
Lommy and
Eönwë - and anyone else - I'd just want to say the following... Don't raise the level of expectations for yourself too high. This is no Hollywood or BBC production with professional actors, directors, studio conditions or equipment. We are amateurs all of us who have gotten an idea to do something fun together. Right? It would be awesome if we could - come fall - boast that we have indeed made one chapter from the LotR together over seas and continents. And we have had fun with it. And we can remember that thing when we're old in a way "well, then we did this thing back in the early third millenia... now where's that file again... I was soo young back then, just listen to my funny voice..."
I got
Matthew's clips finally. I'm afraid most email-providers have a 10MB size limit what comes to attachements so we should start using mp3's indeed. Otherwise the files get too big to be posted. I'm trying to upload the next bigger one to Myspace though. If it works we could share larger files that way later. But just for now let's stick to mp3's (I know I myself said let's try to use wav.-files as they have a better quality but having sent a pile of files recently over this matter I think we need to accept the mp3 format - and it's not that bad compared to the relative differences in the recordinhgs themselves).
I'd advice against meddling with the text, at least in a way of adding things to it. One thing we could and probably should do would be to skip off those narrations which only state "Frodo said" or "said Gandalf" (and there are a lot of those!). When the narration goes like "Bilbo laughed" or "said Elrond Gravely" we should think whether that tone of voice can be acted out clear enough to omit that phrase if that is the only thing that precedes, cuts or follows a speech. But when the narration says fex. "cried Sam, unable to contain himself any longer, and jumping up from the corner..." then the narrator should read that all, also the part "cried Sam".
Legate - and others who have not recorded anything yet: it's pretty much the same what you record now. Take something you like.
The first thing we need to see is, do the equipments work and how they do it? This far we know that Oddwen's equipments work well enough as well as mine (and Lommy & Greenie can use mine as well) and that Matthew has some problems with the technical stuff. I've sent one clip from Matthew to Nerwen for her to see whether she could get better results from it with her dad's stuff.
But there surely is the other dimension as well. It would be useless for me to try a Lobelia just as a technical trial as that would in no case be my character. So keep your favourites coming. After we have a host of them we all have heard we can start to discuss who should take which role.
And we need a narrator as well. I think it would be good if the narrator was someone who speaks English as a mothertongue and has decent equipments because the narrator is the one who has basically the most lines.
About the length then. Oddwen read almost a page and that I think should be the maximum. Matthew has made some takes from almost oneliners to a few sentences. That I think is the minimum.
Regarding the chapter we should try eventually I'd say we should try to choose one which has lots of hobbits and elves in it so that all the females could find characters to themselves - if we are to try female voices as hobbits and elves in the first place; I do think myself it's a good idea as there are so many females compared to males in relation to the roles in the actual books.
Although a chapter with a few orcs as well might do as I could run the female orc-voices through a guitar amplifier with distortion or something... it might sound interesting as well.