This week we received some feedbacks for our PB4 rough cut from Brian and the guests he brought. The rough cut we had was really rough. It only contains an intro and the interviews we are going to include in the final piece. For the intro I was trying to stimulate a scene of someone trying to work on a essay but got disrupted by phone notifications and rings. It includes sound of writing, typing and vibrating. Multiple notification sounds, phone calls and video calls.

Here are the feedbacks we received.

  • We need to make the start of the audio more obvious. We added sounds of someone writing and trying to work which is then interrupted by social media notifications. The problem was that it wasn’t clear that there was writing and so it seemed to start off quite slowly. To improve this we need to make it more obvious about what we are trying to put across.
  • Our interviews need to be cut up more and interspersed with each other. With the whole interview of each person put in, listeners may lose interest because of lack of texture. To fix this it was suggested that we find parts that are relevant to each other from each interview and then cut these and put them together to add variety. We could also overlap some of the interviews so as one interview ends we could use a fade out transition as another one starts simultaneously. As long as it is still clear what people are saying.
  • It would be a good idea to include a story throughout our piece. To do this we could use our introduction, someone trying to get work done but then getting distracted by social media, and keep coming back to that idea to create a story. Hopefully, this will add a flow to the podcast and make it less disjointed.
  • Collage of sound was good. Pan sounds to different sides. Put sound of typing down the middle to connect it more to personal.
  • Can be a mix of documentary and podcast conventions.
  • Humour: have distractions in piece.
  • Keep it colourful and fun
  • Add delays or reverbs for transitions

Shout out to Marie for analyzing the feedbacks when I was communicating with our audience.

Those feedbacks are extremely helpful, it clearly told me which part was good and which parts needs to be improved. Especially for the interviews, I always though the interview part was a bit long and hard for audience to focus on, cut them into pieces and put them in another order can really help with that. The one about panning sounds to different sides also reminded me how we can use stereo properly. It can take the audio to another level. We have also added some fun parts and made the intro more obvious so every audience could know what kind of scene I was trying to stimulate. The only one I could not apply was the one about including a story throughout the piece. We failed to find place to fit in the story, and if we roughly put it in it would sound awkward and not smooth. So we decided to let that one go after a discussion.

Those feedbacks helped us to improve what we already have and gave us a lot of inspiration for the ones we haven’t recorded yet. Again, extremely helpful.