Semester 2 has well and truly begun with our first Radio’s New Wave Studio project; a peer portrait, done and dusted. I had the pleasure of working with Emily Wade who I find incredibly chilled out and easy to chat to. We started this assignment by sitting outside a pub with a beer (Stone&Wood get in ma belleh) and a Zoom H2n each, and simply questioned each other one at a time in more of a conversational manner rather than a straight up interview. Looking back on the recordings, I found I had a fair amount of stimulus on Emily’s experiences living around various places in Australia and decided from there to make that my focus point.
I found the quality of some of the recordings were somewhat marred by the traffic going by us. However, I feel the traffic noise was appropriate for the subject being spoken about by Emily – travelling. What better way to soundtrack travel than with traffic? Having said that, if I were to do it again I may have recorded in a quiet room and layered in the traffic to allow more room to experiment with sound and creativity.
I managed to utilise layers in the ambient sound effects of rainforest sounds and seagull cries to emphasise the point that Emily’s favourite place is the Border Ranges, where the rainforest meets the sea. I also used layering the names of the places she’s been in the beginning, as well as when she talks about her hectic time in Sydney.
A factor I found particularly difficult with this project was simply learning a new editing program from scratch. I used Reaper which I had never used before, so the process of editing was slow in the beginning, but Emily and I met up and managed to get the hang of Reaper faster by working together. Hopefully in the next project, since I’ll have the basics of Reaper almost mastered, I’ll be able to do some more complex sound editing techniques and effects.
Overall though, it’s been a blast working with Emily and I’m relatively happy with the outcome of my piece on her.