As part of my volunteer work at Boys Brigade I was asked to organise and lead an orienteering route to be part of our Summer programme. Instead of just making an ordinary point to point walk I decided to add something to make it a little bit more interesting. Taking the popular television show the X-Files (hence the pun) as my inspiration I created a story based mystery for the boys to read as they went along. By the end of the walk the boys needed to work out what was going on and who the killer was. It was an instant success and instead of the boys complaining about being tired or bored they were excited about wanting to look at the map and work out how to reach the next checkpoint and find the next part of the story.
As the years went on I tried to find exciting new locations to include in each story. The fifth X-Phils adventure took us to the Roman Fort at Silchester for a ghost story which hinged on the boys being able to find a necklace which I had hidden on the route and given hints on how to find. I have included the complete story as a pdf document here: X-Phils 5 pdf 118kb
For the sixth and most recent X-Phils I wanted to do something very different. I wanted the storyline to centre on a military recording which would seem to confirm the existence of aliens. The boys as the FBI agent in the story would be attempting to find this recording only when they found it they would not be reading about a recording, they would find an actual MP3 player with a real recording on it and listen to it.
<audio recording and editing>
I asked for some volunteers at a website forum I regularly visit to help me with this project. I wrote the script (which included several inside jokes for the volunteers from the forum), posted it on the website and asked people to email me their recordings. I was able to get some great performances from people all over the world, a school teacher from New York City, an Australian, a Canadian, a working actress from California (nobody famous but she was very good) and even a Rocket Scientist from the USA. I did have to play one of the parts myself, you will have to guess which, but eventually I had the recordings for the seven parts I needed.
I had thought the process of editing and joining together the recordings would be simple, but it was actually a lot of hard work. First of all I had to make the formats and sample rates identical. I had to convert some recordings into WAV so I could change the sample rate to 128kbps and then convert back to MP3 format. Then upon joining all the recordings together in order I noticed the sound levels were all over the place, one was very loud, the next far too quiet, also there was a lot of background noise on some recordings while others were completely clean like the actress from California who had used her professional home studio.
Fortunately I have an excellent piece of software called Nero on my home PC and was able to clean up the background noise, equalise the sound levels and even add some reverb and other audio effects to improve the atmosphere created by the recording. This is the reason I have included this page in my portfolio, I think this is a strong example of my creativity and ability to take on new challanges and learn new skills. I think the finished result is very effective and the boys really enjoyed the evening I had organised. It is nice when your efforts are appreciated like that and I was able to record a thank you cheer from the boys which I posted on the website for my friends who took part.
Here are the links to the MP3 recordings of the first scene and also a short epilogue which I played to the boys at the end of the walk to conclude the story. I have included links to the original recordings so you can hear the difference in quality between what I started with and the finished recording I produced. There is also a pdf document which includes the written story elements.
- Scene 1 Complete mp3 2.6mb
- Scene 1 Unedited mp3 2.7mb
- Epilogue Complete mp3 1.17mb
- Epilogue Unedited mp3 1.2mb
- X-Phils 6 pdf 117kb
I am planning to create a new X Phils orienteering adventure for this coming Summer which will include the use of a laptop computer which the boys must carry with them and the story will be presented on webpages. At each checkpoint they will find a password which will allow them to gain access to the next part of the story.