It’s been hell of a ride making PB4 and missing a team member has definitely made it harder. However, working with Joanna was an absolute pleasure as she was innovative and hard working. Getting things done in time is her aesthetic.
Starting off with researching, we were stuck in the mindset of doing something specifically including the work ‘attention’, and that made it hard to explore around the topic and we could not find the ideal information. We wanted to do something that would pose a social debate, so plain scientific facts did not really came to our mind. We spent almost two weeks not knowing what to do and then a friend of mine who’s also doing this course told me that it did not have to be so specifically focused on ‘attention’, anything that contains it partially would be fine. So in this group discussion that we had in week 10, I suggested that we should do something with female nudity being a method to grab attention as I was constantly bothered by the objectification of women in films and TV series and advertisements. Joanna and Kate agreed and then we finally proceeded to the next phase which was to find academic sources.
But the thing was that Kate had been sick and she could not attend any group discussions so eventually Joanna and I just had to do it on our own. For this audio documentary, we wanted to do interviews and get different point of views. And Jeremy suggested that we could interview someone who did life drawing as it is a way that approaches nudity as a form of art. And he also told us about Dr. Stayci Taylor, who was an RMIT staff that did a project with a feminist focus as she was in the industry and has got some strong opinions on this topic. Joanna happened to have a friend who’s doing fashion design and did life drawing so she contacted her straight away. I emailed Dr. Taylor and she agreed to do the interview.
The two interviewees were really busy so we did not get to interview them until one day the rough cut was due. We interviewed Jenny the night before and Dr. Taylor just before the workshop of week12.
We made a list of questions for both of them. I thought asking the same questions would be fair. So here’s the 5 questions we prepared.
– What is your opinions on female nudity being a method to attract attention in the media?
– Why do you think that media makers would utilize nudity (especially female nudity) in their work?
– Do you think that nudity is seen positively in classical art but negatively in popular culture? Explain your answer.
– Do you think that we encounter female nudity much more often that male nudity? Explain your answer.
– Why do you think objectification of women happens in the media?
We thought we would not put our questions in the audio documentary as it’s only 7-8 mins. The questions were just to get the interviewees to talk about this issue.
The interview with Jenny took so long to do because she found the questions hard to answer so she had to type her answers out first, otherwise she said she’d be rather nervous and stutter a lot. So we let her take her time to answer the questions and answer her questions about out questions for her. We wanted the interviewee to fell comfortable with what she’s doing even if it would take some time. On the other hand, Dr. Taylor’s interview went really well, as she was a teacher and had done studies of the topic. The interview finished within 20 mins.
We recorded the narration on the last week, using the room 9.1.19, which was the one we used for Dr. Taylor’s recording. Our idea was to do a podcast session so it’d include us chatting for a bit. Joanna did not really listen to podcast so I just showed her the one I always listened – BBC Breakfast Show with Nick Grimshaw. It’s really casual and involves mostly relaxed conversations with the guests. After she got the idea of what it was like, we started off recording. We practiced a bit more to get into the weirdly cheerful podcast hosts mood before we recorded. It went pretty well for me but Joanna was not satisfied with her part so we recorded a couple more times of her part and then it’s done. We recorded the intro, the in between interviews bit and the ending all together.
For editing, Joanna and I did it together, there’s a lot of ‘um’s and stutters that we cut out from both interviews and we cut out more content that were off topic. This could shorten the length and increase the fluency of the interviews, making them sound more confident with more credits. And for music, we decided to use one of my original music as there’s no copyright issues. For the background music, we asked Jenny to record the atmospheric sound of the life drawing room with the sound of her sketching and people’s vague chatter in the background. For Dr. Taylor’s soundtrack, we decided to use the sound of typing (we recorded ourselves) as she did screen writing. We used the same music for the intro and outro just like how a lot of podcast shows do, using the rhythm as a symbol of the show. For noise reduction, I used the same technique that was used for PB3. Jenny’s clips was the one that had to be fixed the most as it was recorded in Joanna’s room (we booked a session in 9.1.19 but Jenny was busy at that time and could not make it). Dr. Taylor’s part was very clear already so I only slightly fixed it.
The overall timbre of the audio is light and relaxed but harsh in content. If it’s done is a very formal way, people would get tired of it before we get into the main arguments. So we wanted the mood/vibe to be chill but serious at the same time. Something that people would not turn away when they listen. I believe that we sort of achieved what we wanted and posed a social debate that would linger in people’s mind after they’ve listened. We did not do much analysis on the interviews in our narration as we did not want our opinions to affect the listener’s perspective as our opinions could very much be biased.
I was really satisfied with the work and for future improvement, I’d really like to see more podcast like stuff appear in our recording like the chatting the laughing, more casual stuff. The narration we did were mainly written down prior to recording so it did feel like reading the scripts sometimes. Next time I’d like to try something that goes naturally without planning.
And here’s the screen shot of the final edit.
