Last words

I have completed this term's intensive, and I feel that I did a good job. I'm very tired now, but also I feel like I really learnt and pushed myself to be better.
In the final mix I have 11 one-minute pieces, just in case one of them sucks and I need to hand in one more.
I've managed my time well and now I am finished. The pieces aren't perfect, there are some things that I was not able to prevent, but overall I am happy with the final product that I will be presenting.
Cheers for now!
Xoxo

The end is nigh

This term has been very exciting and very challenging in many aspects. I'm from a print background, so radio was something completely new and different for me. It was a different experience, because I had a big ass marantz and earphones and a microphone to play with. I felt like a grown kid on Christmas playing with all the supergeeky equipment. Finding 10 voices in Grahamstown was tough, I'm naturally quite reserved, so I really had to push myself to speak to people who were not just my peers.
The editing was frustrating. While I was recording I thought I had such great stuff and when I sat down often I felt like I was trying to swim through mud. Many of my interviews turned out to be very issue-based, which wasn't the brief of the assignment. The purpose was to find personal narratives to make creative sound bites. When you listen to my sound you're supposed to really feel like you know the person I interviewed. In some cases, like with Tummy and Lauren, I feel that I achieved this. In others perhaps not so much.
When all was done and I had 10 one minute clips I realised that in my endeavour to have perfect quality sound I've somewhat neglected the content, and my pieces are a tad boring. I think the sting makes it sound more exciting.
Using Adobe Audition has been challenging. It has also been very rewarding. In second year we has a semester long radio course, but it's too long ago to be an expert. However most of it returned to me as I went along.
I really enjoyed the whole process. I enjoyed recording people, editing the audio, taking coffee into the Radio labs, scouting around the journ department for hot water, shivering through the cold, bitching through the heat, and above of all, lsitening to the end product.
In future I like the idea of combining radio and print to do something amazing. I'm not big into the idea of online media, I like kicking it old school, and this was a valuable experience, because I learnt the nitty gritty inner works of recording and editing.

Audit

Andile - 1:27.873 Mixdown
Chante - 1:00.886 Mixdown
Jock - 1:03.378 Mixdown
Lauren - 1:04.302 Mixdown
Louise - 1:15.403 Mixdown
Sarah - 1:30.367 Mixdown
Sunali - 1:01.798 Mixdown
Tim - 1:30 Mixdown
Tristan - 1:20.271 Mixdown
Tummy - 0:55.382

I'm getting quite nervous now, because they sound so bland. I'm thinking maybe I should put some music in it, some bee sounds, some chanting, I really don't know.

Almost there

So now I have edited everything down to a minute. What comes next is the mix down, and letting my lecturer listen to what I have so far. This is really scary, because she might tell me to do it al lover again, and that'll suck a lot! I hope it's not too bad, I really worked constantly hard these past month.
I can see the areas where I excell and where I lack, which is the result of four years of academic study and critical self evaluation I suppose. My sound quality is fine, because I used the check list Jayne gave us. On the other hand it's quite obvious that I'm not very creative. I did a few outdoor interviews, but most of my subjects are indoor kinda people with jobs that are difficult to depict in sound. From the chaos sprung forth something neat and clean, but perhaps too clean to be awesome.
So for now I'm going to listen to all the sessions and start smoothing over the roughness. Keep thumbs!

Rough editing done!

Okay so now I have somehow managed to get 10 one minute sound bites. It was challenging to edit mostly half hour recordings down to a minute, and most of mine are 1 minute to 1:30 minutes long. It's not a train smash, but I don't think I was very creative when I first started out doing the interviews, and now it seems quite bland.
In any case I am done with the first part of editing, and it was lots of fun. Dipuo and I have been sitting in the radio labs from early morning till supper time every day this week and the previous week, and it's been entertaining. We've had coffee and chatted, and complained about the loud third years, and it's been a blast.
Next I have to refine my portraits and try to make them more interesting, maybe record some wild track for those that don't have contextual sounds. My favourite one so far is the one I did with Tummy, and that was supposed to be the extra one I just did because I saw him randomly and asked him to speak into the microphone.
Furthermore today I got a cool picture of one of my interviewees, Tim Huisamen, from Stephen Mina. Stephen is a great artist and he drew Mr Huisamen to the T. Check out his work at http://funklordsteve.deviantart.com/ It's really awesome:)

The art of manipulating audio

The past weeek and a bit has been traumatic. I've loved, and lost, and regained, and lost again. I'm an idiot, but I managed to make more work for myself by losing near-to-perfection sessions and then having to redo it all over again. (Luckily I write down what I take out of the original clip so I didn't have to sift through everything again, but still.)
So anyway editing is going well. I'm nearly done with getting all the content together. I've struggled to keep it to a minute, Jayne said a minute and a half is fine, but I don't want all of mine to be 1:30. Anyway, I'll still figure it all out.

More editing goodness

I interviewed this guy Tummy, he's a self appointed security guard on High Street by Mad Hatters coffee shop, on the corner of High Street and Thompson Street. I stayed in Thompson Street for a little while, and sometimes he'd be quite a nuisance, coming to tell us that one of the 5 houses in the street were broken into. The thing is we know all the people in the street, and they all said they were fine. It seemed like he was telling us this to ensure us that he was useful and necessary, and that was so sad. So I walk past him everyday and we'll have a chat, cause he's very amusing and talkative. Then I shoved a mike in his face and he clammed up, all the stuff he'd been telling me about his hardship vanished and all he could get out was that work is important to him. So I was going to discard it, but now as I went through it and edited some, it actually doesn't sound half bad, and his voice holds his hardship, without him having to say it.
Awe