Final Feature Submission
Finally, the time has come. After months of talking, prep and interviews and hours and hours of editing in the basement, we’ve submitted our final cut of our feature for RWAV, ‘The Unspoken’!
It’s been a fantastic process, and Claudia and Callista were great to work with. Below are some of my musings on today’s editing.
Final Edit // Cut
I was able to put up a rough cut of the whole piece when I was in by myself yesterday, using the files we’d all uploaded to ROAR and allowing everyone to listen, make notes and consider the final cut overnight. It made it much easier when we all came in today and were on the same page, so could agree on polishing edits quickly!
This also gave me a chance to think of some sound layers that could be used to segue between pieces, and check in with everyone about what else we needed, and whether I needed to collect any more tape for the ‘how do you greet a stranger?’ segment.
Final Edit // Polish
We had a few minor frustrations with Audition today – mostly just learning how to use the multitrack function.
I learnt:
- You can’t cut and paste straight into a multitrack session – you have to edit the file as an audio file, then open it in the multitrack session
- You can’t modify a file that’s open in the multitrack session or it stuffs it up
- The bar at the top of the screen where you can see the joins between tracks is a really useful way to navigate the sections we were working on (mostly just the seams, and linking each segment up)
I was particularly happy with a couple of things as well though:
- The opening, where I blended the sound of an old dial-up modem with a track by Eels. I was worried it might have been too long, but we all agreed it settled the listener into the tone of the piece really well
- The use of ‘Trying to Reach You’ by Nurses as a recurrent motif. I feel like this track suited the tone of the piece well, and the lyrics were relevant to the theme but not ‘on the nose’. We chatted about the motif, as we weren’t sure that the piece would work with that, or whether it needed it (plus this pushed us a little more over the 10min mark) but we decided that having something to segue between segments was an important signifier for the listener, and I was happy with the way we mixed it down underneath the speakers’ voices.