Thursday, October 16, 2008

complete the story ...Princess Fiona

Our princess Fiona is playing with her little kitten, in the royal garden. Here comes the courtier bringing the message of the king. The king asked Fiona to come to the palace as the prince of Maryland has come to ask for Fiona’s hand. The king wants them to meet each other and decide about their lives themselves. The Prince is very dashing and intelligent. He impresses princesses Fiona by his wit and humor. Fiona impresses Prince by her beauty and kind heart. They decide to marry next summer.
Every evening the Prince comes to the garden and princess and her kitten meet him near the pond. They keep talking and the kitten keeps running and jumping near them. One day the prince asked Fiona for a date. Mad in his love, she forgot to tell it to her father. With her little kitten she got on to his car. Soon they were on the highway. Suddenly the smart and dashing prince turned into a crooked old man. The princess got scared and started crying….

[complete the story and get it publish/released on runjhunstory.com]

complete the story 2...Rohu's misadventure

Start can be, our hero, Rohu is sitting in an airplane. He plays a song on his Ipod but it doesn’t play. He remembers that he did not charge it before boarding. So he starts reading a comic. Suddenly there are two guys standing in front of him with the gun pointed at his head. One of them asks Rohu, “Give me the Holophonic Mercurial Chip. The two evils after hijacking the plane, want to take the plane to wicked world of weapons. The chip has the address of the place. In this new World they will conduct testing and experiments on these humans and develop more dangerous weapons. They had put the chip in Rohu’s iPod during security check. After they saw Rohu fiddling with the iPod, they thought that Rohu knows about the chip and scared that he might throw it; they quickly came with the gun.
“Give me the holophonic Mercurrial Chip” he shouted again. “Give me the damn iPod.”
He snatches the iPod and opens it…. alas! The chip is not here…
[complete the story and get it publish/released on runjhunstory.com]

complete the story...give a name

Start can be, our hero, Venky is studying in a school. The Mathematics teacher is a monster and she hates Venky. She has a very strange way of teaching. She takes out everyone’s lunch box and finishes one by one, explaining what is the meaning of subtraction by one, two, three….(and a couple of more such examples). Venky is a dude. He outsmarts the teacher every time she tries to put him in a trap.
Once, Venky’s parents went out of town for one week. The teacher knew that now there is no one to help Venky. She gave one very tough question in the class and asked everyone to get the answer within 3-4 days. Venky had no way of solving this question. He came back home and thought, “what can I do now, now the teacher will kill me”. He asked his maid/domestic to help him, but no one knew the answer.
He thought about the punishment and got scared…
Later in the night Venky gets an idea. Next day morning, he goes to the teacher’s place and secretly puts a letter in the letter box…
Then ...[complete the story and get it publish/released on runjhunstory.com]

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

what story a child 'needs' today

Well, I was thinking what sort of stories a child needs these days. Its difficult to answer this question like this. Lets start thinking in a different manner. What are the common problems parents sense in their children? Stage fright, shyness, insensitivity, inobedience, bad company, etc etc. What interests todays children? Action-adventure stories, super natural characters, magical powers, fairytales, heroic deeds etc etc. Now when we look at the two answers together, we come to the conclusion that we should have stories with the body of what a child likes or listens to and soul of what parents want them to understand. I came up with a few categories - 1. Bindas Bittu - This girl is a street smart. She talks to the strangers very confidently, enters the cockpit with utter innocence, bunks classes and still manages to study and pass. Every time Bittu goes to school she faces a new problem on her way. She fixes that up and reaches the class late and outsmarts the teacher and continues classes. Everyday is a new story...
2. Responsible Rony - A very responsible, sincere, obedient boy. How does his these qualities help him get wins and wins over his competitors. How he always succeeds. The stories will make kids more sensetive about friends, elders, teachers etc.
3. Chatur Chintu - Sharp, witty, clever and more is our Chintu. His wisdom makes him everyone's favorite. His judgements solve all quarrels. His ideas create history. And his stories leaves children wondering...
4. Fairy Fiona - She is the beautiful, supernatural fairy. She has various magical powers. Her stories amuses children and streches their creativity. In her world birds swim and trees dance, donkeys talk and ghosts are sweet.
We are striving to produce something children not just need but want too...
Soon you will see stories in these categories and a lot more at runjhunstory.com.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

what all it takes to create an amazing audio story

Have you seen www.runjhunstory.com ?
Have you ever wondered what all it takes to create an amazing audio story like the ones available here? I will tell you.
1. First of all you need to choose the category for the stories you want to produce. Categories are of different kind - genre (mythological, action-adventure, sci-fi etc) , age group (3-5, 6-8, 9-12) et. So once you finalize that you need stories in this particular category for this age group children, you move to next step.
2. Then you look for stories. There are plenty stories available on net in various forms - text, audio, video, animation etc. You have to choose the stories which are not copyrighted by anyone (Panchantantra, folktales etc.)
3. Once you have short-listed the stories, you need to write the script for it. The script needs to have following properties:
a. Very easy language
b. grammatically perfect and semantically correct.
c. possesing lots of variety of moods and tones - should not be monotonous.
d. short and crsip - should not be dragged
e. possesing scope of dramatization while narrating
4. Once you are ready with your scripts, you need to read the script a couple of times. Now along with reading it, you need to imagine the story happening in front of your eyes. With that imagination, mark the places in the script where you think any specific sound effect should come. Also mark the lines where you want the narration to be in some specific tone.
5. Then comes the narration part. You have to narrate the story as if you are telling it to 10-15 children sitting in front of you. Whenever there is any description of any motion/movement/activity in the story, create some sounds yourself. Narrate the story very slowly and clearly. The pronounciation should be very very clear and immaculate. Leave some space for the sound effects you had planned. Also in case there are multiple characters, in your mind decide how you are going to modulate voice for each of them. While narrating every single line, understand the meaning and give the pauses at the correct places. Do not break the rytheme while narrating a single sentence. Be present in the story and not outside the story.
6. Once the narration and retakes are complete and you have enough footage to complete the story perfectly, you start editing the story.
7. The editing, dubbing and mixing is very important task. it includes the following steps
a. First round of editing is just to remove all the re-takes and take the best out of all retakes. You put together the best of the recordings and complete the narration part. Then you remove the air noice and balance the dB level of the complete story.
b. Next you start digging in your pool of sounds and picking up the ones you think can be relevant to any part of the story. Simultaneously, you need to think in the other way. You need to revise the story in mind and think of the sounds you need. And then look for such sounds. If you are not able to find any specific sounds,create such sounds using various audio editing softwares.
c. After you have a good collection of sounds, you need to start putting the sounds at the correct place in the story (on another channel) using the audio editing softwares.
d. Now you may also need some music in the background. Search for (or create) the music you need and put it along with the story in another channel.
e. Add reverb to the narration, whereever you think it is needed.
f. Now complete the story and listen to it for speech-music-sounds balancing. Correct in case there is any problem.
8. Congrats your story is ready. Enjoy