So, the time has finally come where I can look back on Room With A View in its entirety and reflect. The semester has flown by and yet it feels like so long ago that we were first sitting in the studio at RRR and hearing about how the semester would work.
Honestly, I find reflecting on such a big subject and time difficult. I don’t necessarily know how I’ve grown, I think this will become apparent when I start my next project and I notice some improvement in my skills and in the final outcome. If I break it down into assessments so I can think about each individual project and what it taught me:
First RWAV show:
I think our first show went really well. As I detailed at the time, I found my role as producer to be lacking in any clear-cut definition and without many tangible tasks. This was just due to the nature of the show and the fact that so much of the work a “real-world” producer typically does was done by my other group members. But anyway. I think our first show was a few levels up from our second show. I think Dusty and Sammy spoke well as presenters, however, I think there might have been too much of a difference between their voices. It’s a fine line between having great audio texture (if that’s not a thing, it is now) and distinguishable voices and having voices that are slightly jarring in their differences. Not sure which side of the line they stood, but it was close either way. Nothing they can help, obviously. Rose was super prepared as panel operator and I found it cool how she had said at the beginning of the subject that she would prefer not to do the panel because she thought she’d muck it up, and then she totally smashed it!
I’m still not sure of how I can reflect on this show as an individual. I think I gained more vicarious experience than I did hands-on.
Individual interview:
This was fun and good practice but as I know from my feedback, and as I had predicted, overall it really wasn’t that interesting. Leah (interviewee) was quite nervous but more to the point didn’t have that much new information to share and didn’t really have a fresh enough take on the topic of the housing market to warrant a whole interview.
Leah wasn’t the first person I contacted, I had initially reached out to someone who works for the Eastern Alliance for Greenhouse Action, a big long name for an organization that represents/is a mix of people and representatives from the eastern councils in Melbourne, that focuses on community and local government sustainability. This is more niche and a fresher topic, but the potential interviewee was overseas right up until the due date. I think this would have been a better interview.
However, I don’t regret interviewing Leah. The downfalls weren’t with her as an interviewee. It was a mix of factors, including that she didn’t have a fresh take on it but also the questions I asked her and the way I edited it. Also, I stand by my point that it isn’t right to tell someone something will be aired on radio and then not air it. I understand it happens in the media and in real life but I didn’t feel comfortable doing that, especially if they were a full-time worker and would be taking valuable time out of their day under the potentially false premise that the interview would be on the radio.
Anyway, with the content I had, I think/believe I did a technically good job at editing. I maybe could have made some different choices to make the interview more interesting but I still like how it came together. I also had fun working on Auditon again.
Feature:
I am really happy with how our feature turned out. It was pretty easy to think of the idea and find people to interview, but more time consuming to think of the right and appropriate questions to ask them. Dusty especially worked really hard on this and thought of an unimaginably large plethora of questions for each interviewee. I have to say I didn’t focus on the feature very much at the beginning and didn’t do nearly as much work in the planning of it as Sammy and Dusty did because I was focusing on (and stressing about) our second show which came at a similar time to the feature. During this time when I wasn’t helping out as much I relied on the fact that I could/would do a lot more of the editing work, which I did.
Dusty and Sammy did most of the interviews- they both spoke to Ben Byrne (RMIT Academic), Dusty spoke to Robbie Nicols from White Man Behind a Desk, and Sammy spoke to Beth from Beth Blvd. Rose and I interviewed Andrew Mills from the YouTube miniseries Leftovers. I have been an avid watcher of this YouTube channel for a long time so it was awesome to speak to him about all the work that goes into it etc. We found that he was quite a bit shyer than some of our other interviewees and so it took him a while to warm up, but that wasn’t a big problem.
After we had all the content, then came the task of editing, which we started 4 or so days after our last interview. I put a lot of time and work into editing it and to take 2+ hours of content with 4 different interviewees and to get it under 15 minutes with a clear progression is difficult. I didn’t really think about how difficult it would be to gain some kind of concise and clear flow to the piece. Obviously, you plan to a degree before the interviews but theres only so much you can do, as you need all of them to be able to work out what will sound best where, and what won’t be included.
JJ and I spent three long days in the edit suites in building 9 finding the storyline for our piece and making it pleasing to the ears. Dusty and Sammy came in a lot too, but they were both mroe pre-occupied with other study and uni requirements than JJ and I were, and they had done all of the preproduction work anyway.
On the first day, we went through all the interviews, cut out anything that wasn’t relevant or said well, then went through and sorted it into different categories/questions so we could more easily map out the progression. At the end of the day, we’d been through all our content but didn’t have it in any order or anything which I found quite stressful. We started a ‘run-sheet’ or plan of the piece, but I found that really difficult and quite pointless. I thought it would be best just to play around with the clips in audition and from that see what works where.
So on the next day, JJ and I came in and we were soon joined by Sammy, and then later Dusty too. Sammy did a great job of organizing the clips and actually just getting rid of a lot of them too. This was something I was finding difficult, as there was so much that was so relevant and interesting! But there’s only so much you can keep, and Sammy laid a really good foundation on which we could move little clips around and keep adjusting to improve the whole piece.
That’s what we spent the rest of the time- a day and a half- doing. Continuously cutting clips down when the interviewee was repeating themselves, taking out pauses, ums and errrs, adjusting the volume, moving clips around, cutting them up, re-arranging them again and so on. It was an incredibly arduous process and I found the ability to make a quick decision to be a life-saver (and not always an ability I have). On the last day, I did a lot of the editing while JJ worked on her blog and other pressing things (but was there for help and second opinions). I had to leave mid-to-late afternoon, before the feature was finished. I gave her some quick instructions/advice to finish it off and thought we’d be good to wrap it up there. I think however there must have been a miscommunication or something of the like because when she uploaded it later there were more issues than earlier on in the day. I feel very grateful but also very bad for JJ, she spent over 12 hours in the basement and ended up uploading the piece over 6 times to google drive for Dusty to listen to (the rest of us were busy) before getting more advice or changes to make. This is not their fault at all but would have been a lot more cohesive if there were still a few of us in the studio.
Anyway, I was back in the city at 7.30 (I had left at 4) and poor JJ was still in the suites so I went out and helped her. We spent another 2 hours on it again, until it was at a point we were happy with. I hadn’t realised how much more there was to do earlier. However, it is a good thing I had to listen back to it so many times as it became clearer as to what needed changing/fixing/deleting. It was also frustrating as a few little things took our time, like finding the right music and adjusting the volume of each clip to be the same (tried to get Audition to do it for me but it didn’t work). Anyway, again I left before JJ as needed to get up very early. She just had to upload it to SoundCloud but still, I’m very appreciative of all the work and time she put into it. I’m really happy with how it turned out and for the most part, think we worked really well together as a group.
In terms of the subject as a whole, I enjoyed it (mostly). There were peaks and troughs- troughs at high moments of stress (before second show, editing feature) and peaks when we worked really well as a group together (first live show, finishing the feature and everyone loving it). I think our semester was difficult at times because our assessments weren’t evenly spread, because we went first for the live show, then had a massive break before our feature/second live show, which was a time I felt incredibly stressed. But I had a great time too. It was a special experience to be working with the same group for the entire semester, something I haven’t done yet as this was my first studio. I was blessed with a motivated, smart and reliable group who I really enjoyed working with. I think I enjoyed working on the feature more than the radio shows, as there wasn’t as much external pressure for it to fit into RRR’s guidelines etc, but nonetheless, both experiences were awesome and it was really special to be able to go on the radio (and pick all the songs!)
Overall, RWAV was quite challenging at times, but rather enjoyable and an invaluable experience.