In this weeks workshop, we covered a number of things. First of all, we all showed our finished self-portraits, and it was very interesting to see everyone else’s idea of ‘identity’. I was fascinated about how everyone approached this task. Some were abstract, some were quite simple, and others were just weird (like mine!). One thing I did notice was that a lot of people used a birds-eye view of themselves walking. Another common shot was a close-up of tea/coffee being poured.

Photo Credit: alideniese via Compfight cc

The second thing we talked about was the readings, which seems to be a compulsory occurrence within these workshops. The readings for this week covered the important and influence of audio within media. There were two things that were discussed that stuck-out for me. One, is that audio is more important than visual. I cannot express how much I agree with this. I believe a video with professional audio and poor visuals is a lot worse than a video with professional visuals and poor audio. There’s nothing more distracting than having unwanted noise in your audio, or even having audio peak during playback. It takes away from the immersion, and makes viewers remember that the movie they’re watching has something going on outside of the frame of the movie behind the scenes. Secondly, we also discussed how similar visual and audio is to one another in terms of perspective. Both mediums have a foreground, mid-ground and background. Visually, a person can be stood in the foreground, with a car in the mid-ground and mountains in the background. In terms of audio, a person speaking can be louder and more prominent in the foreground, while the engine of a car is in the mid-ground and the wind passing the mountains is in the background.

This led to the exercise for the day. In partners, we were tasked with the job of recording an interview with each other, and also some ambient sounds as well. We first started with the interviews. The first thing we did was look for a quiet place to lockout unwanted sounds to record clean audio for the interview. Our first idea was the disabled toilets, which ended up not going as planned as you could hear the thumping of footsteps as people walked past the door. And also, there was nothing weirder than two guys in one toilet. Anyway, we ended recording in a stairwell which was completely empty. Next, we recorded the ambient sounds of cafes, streets, walking and even trams. The recorded audio now had to be edited together to try replicate the idea of placing the listener in the action. So now, without further ado… I present you my finished audio edited together!

So in recording the separate audio files, we encountered a few problems. First, was unwanted noise. In a busy place like RMIT, it’s very hard to find somewhere quiet and empty where no audio sources other than the interviewee is recorded. Like I said before, we did end up finding an empty stairwell. However, one problem with this stairwell was the quality of the acoustics in the room. The amount of echo produced from speaking was incredibly high, due to the solid walls rebounding the sound waves off their surfaces, instead of absorbing it like softer materials such as foam or cloth. I did manage to fix this in post-production using Adobe Audition however, by reducing the amount of reverb in the audio of the interview.

In terms of success however, I got pretty lucky recording the audio of the bells of a tram. I feel like the bells on a tram is on of the most recognizable sounds when walking through the Melbourne CBD. And by using this audio of the tram ringing, I was able to better set the scene of my audio, and make it feel like we were next to a tram track.