My attempt at a one-man play was a pretty entertaining and generally pain-free task.

1. After some brainstorming, I settled on a scene from The Breakfast Club–I really wanted to do something from popular film. (When I do this assignment again, it’s going to be this scene from A Few Good Men…).

2. I found the script from the scene easily enough, by just typing in a few lines of the scene’s dialogue into Google.

3. I downloaded and installed Audacity, hit record, and gave the scene a shot. I was fairly satisfied with the quality of my reading after a couple of takes.

4. I used Audacity’s help feature to figure out how to Amplify certain phrases (i.e., turn up the volume) and Cut some of the empty spaces. This was very easy to do.

5. It was so easy, that I figured I’d go ahead and try to create an Autotuned version of my reading. This resulted in about two hours of downloading the wrong plug-ins to Audacity. I finally got the correct download installed so that the Autotune feature showed up in the Effects toolbar. I fooled around with it for a bit, but each time I tried to apply a setting it appeared to flatline the entire scene so nothing was audible. There are a couple of Autotalent (the program I downloaded) tutorials on Youtube, but nothing with the settings I had… so I abandoned that option for now.