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In the last twenty minutes of this week’s lecture, we were tasked with going out and recording a series of audio clips using the H2N Zoom recorders. The brief stated that in our pairs, one person was to be in the interviewer, and one the interviewee. We were to record one formal interview, and one informal interview. This was to be combined with atmosphere and background sounds, as well as spot sounds. In our project, we chose to focus on the topic of the RMIT City campus.

 

 

Formal Interview: recorded in the RMIT library

This particular location worked very well for a formal interview as recordings produced very little noise; however, due to the nature of the location, the interview was conducted with hushed voices, which detracts from a professional atmosphere. This would have been appropriate if the library were discussed in the interview, however it did not work particularly well in the context of the interview as it was about RMIT City Campus as a whole.

Informal interview: roving recording, walking around the RMIT campus

This interview produced surprisingly clean audio due to the amount of construction that was occurring around us whilst recording. This can most likely be attributed to the recording pattern of the mic, which is designed to pick up ambient noise, whilst retaining focus upon the directed subject. The issue with this recording was that as we were walking, the mic was moving closer, then farther, away from the subject, meaning that the audio went between being loud and quiet, depending on how close the mic was. In future I will try to ensure I keep the microphone at a steady distance from the subject. I was also fixing up gain levels on the mic as we were walking in order to deal with the changing environment, which is why you can hear a noticeable dip in the audio levels midway through the informal interview. Thankfully, much of these issues were able to be corrected, or lessened, in Adobe Audition, which was also used to even out differences in loudness between recordings using the match loudness.

Atmosphere / Background: general street noise / traffic

A fair amount of the atmosphere / background noise was simply traffic noise, which works to reinforce the sense that the informal interview took place outside on the street, walking around campus. When layered, as is noticeable at the beginning of the audio piece, these atmospheric sounds go a long way to establish context within the audio piece, without the need for visuals.

Spot sounds: tram, elevator arrival, doors opening

For the spot sounds, we tried to get as close to our subject, and point the mic directly towards it, in order to achieve the cleanest audio. Due to the nature of the spot sounds we chose to record (moving tram, packed elevator), it was difficult to get close to the source of the sound, however the spot sounds were still quite clean and useable within the piece. We also tried to record a spot sound of walking up stairs, however the audio was plagued with construction noise, which competed with the sound of footsteps to such an extent it ended up being completely unusable.

 

The Edit

The main issue that I found in editing this, was that I couldn’t find a way to integrate the informal interview and the formal interview using the recordings I had without it being jarring. I feel as though this is where ambient audio or music could have been used to create an integrating link between the two pieces.

I am also not particularly pleased with the ending of the piece, as it is rather abrupt, and I feel would have worked a lot better if we had a summarising statement or concluding piece to end upon.

I also played around a little with different audio effects, reducing audio – a tricky process which made the informal interview sound strange, as though it was under water, and which I eventually let alone – playing with different layerings and music tracks. However; I ended up using very little of this in the final piece, as at this stage, while I am still not particularly proficient in sound editing, I like to keep things sounding more authentic, with less effects as, as it’s highly possible that I could make the audio over the top if I edited much more.

I would really like to find time to thoroughly go through all the features of Adobe Audition, and work through how to use the program efficiently and effectively, as I find that it’s far less intuitive that Premiere Pro (however maybe this is due to the fact that I am not an inherently audial person). As audio makes up such a vital component in film, in controlling mood and film tone especially, this is crucial to improving my film practice overall.