For my Peer Portrait in New Wave Radio, I have teamed up with Amy Hanley.
My aim was to create a rich audio vignette using voice over, original music and archived sounds, I wanted the audio to be dynamic with a good volume level sans distortion. I also wanted to explore vocal montage as heard in Just Another Fish by Molly Menschell.
This very short biography of Amy looks at her passions and aspirations, I had given Amy a run down of some questions that I was going to ask a formal recorded interview just incase there were topics that were off limits.
The recording began at The National Gallery of Victoria where I gathered sounds of the fountain. From there, we trekked to RMIT in the hope that someone in the AV department might be so kind as to lend us a sound proof both. Techie and true gentleman Lambros was our knight in shining audio/visual equipment that afternoon.
My questions to Amy for the interview were fairly simple; favourite movie, favourite music, who were her influences and what had inspired her through life, hobbies and profundities etc. It became evident that the ocean has played a big part in Amy’s life, she is a surfer from the West Coast. Naturally, I felt that water could be a good motif element throughout my piece.
The recording device that I used was an H6 Zoom recorder, set to the X/Y axis microphones. A tripod mount for the H6 might have minimised some of the inconsistencies in the audio, as my fatigued arm was struggling to remain still for 20 minutes as I held the device up to the optimum distance from the subject.
The music was my own, it was recorded with a Rode NT1000 microphone and a VST piano on Protools, the edgy opening sound was from the www.freesounds.org file sharing database.
I was most happy with the sound of Amy’s voice, her story (though most of it ended up on the cutting room floor so to speak) and the reflexive introduction. I was most torn by the ambiguity of the duration set in the brief, do I produce 30” or or 2’30”?, and further to this, I most challenged by the compression of 20 magical minutes to 30 seconds. But, one of the biggest hurdles that I faced and am still facing right now as I write, is one involving software. I run Protools and I have it on my iMac at home and in order to put this on my new laptop, I have been advised to update the software though this has caused major problems such as a vicious white noise file conversion. I’m back and forth with Avid tech support and I’ll spare you the jargon and the tears because luckily, I bounced a draft copy to which I am using for this submission.
Protools
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– Menschel, M. (2005) Just Another Fish Story, Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, audio, USA
– Oymaldonado, Guitar Feedback 2, shared on www.Freesounds.org
-Thank you to Yield’s Tin Llama for the use of their SoundCloud site.
