As I’ve gotten started creating metadata for Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas, I think the core thing that seems to be lacking, is the way we do cast lists.
Right now they’re entered as a spoken vocal on a recording with the character name entered as plain text. We can then separately create a character artist and link this to a person artist, but this doesn’t link that specific relationship to a specific recording, which is pretty important where one character is played by multiple artists.
With that in mind, I’ve created two tickets.
This suggests being able to connect a character and artist to the same recording, not entirely sure the best way to structure that, whether a field to allow a character can be added to the spoken vocal, or whether it would require a new relationship type. But I think being able to link these three things together (recording-person-character) is essential for tracking characters and their actors across media.
Second:
This is recommending being able to link those characters to works. This will link the character to the work, and has nothing to do with actors as those are related to recordings. This isn’t quite as useful, but will aid in clearly tracking characters across works.
Near my first go around trying to create improvement tickets (apart from STYLE-2686 suggesting a new attribute), so appreciate any feedback.
I could see another application for this in some soundtracks, where the vocalist is a character voiced by a person, as well as for virtual bands and musicals (both stage and film)
this sounds like a perfect case for 3-point relationships, tho that’s not currently possible (and it is an old ticket)
Situations as well such as individual characters who have multiple performers: for example, different speaking and singing voice actors, or different voice actors in foreign-language dubbings. Simba technically has three VAs in the original Lion King!
that’s pretty easily handled with the current setup, since you can set Spoken vocals or Lead vocals, but yeah, could make that clearer when both the speaking and singing voice actor appear on the same recording
as a related side note, I’ve added a ticket to add a vocal attribute to the artist ↔ artist relationship
another major application (especially for the works relationship) is Opera. I think I have seen a request for this somewhere for this case, but I couldn’t tell you where
This is how we’re currently doing it. The character is in plain text, but it links the actor to the recording.
Instead, right now without any changes we could create a new artist under type “Other”. And call it:
“Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor”.
Then you add these two relationships:
Relationship: Christopher Eccleston (English actor) performed the voice of Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor
Relationship: Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor performed the voice of Ninth Doctor (Fictional Character from Doctor Who)
This joins the artist (person) to the artist (other), and then joins the artist (other) to the artist (character).
Does that make sense? You’re using artist (other) as a bridge object between the person and character, and then joining that bridge object to the recording.
Ideally for an improvement, we could ask for the new artist type “Role” to be created, but technically we could just start doing this right now under “Other” without any improvements.
Nah you’d just link databases to the regular actor or character or work or whatever as you do now, you wouldn’t link another database to the role object.
