The week 11 workshop revolved around the evaluation of the rough cuts of our audio presentations by our tutor, Brian. My group was first to have our draft evaluated, and Brian took some notes during and returned the following points needing addressing before our final submission.

(1) Fix mixing
An apparent issue in our initial cut was the varying volumes of dialogue for myself, Asha and Hazel. Being a confident, loud, speaker – my voice was noticably louder than that of Hazel and Asha, and this should be fixed to make the audio smoother.

(2) Gentle fades
Brian found our textures that we had included to be well-timed, but felt that they were quite abrupt and caused ‘clicking’ on either side of the audio cut. A simple fix for this would be to add gentle fades to the audio.

(3) Better signposting
Brian felt the shift between the two discussed topics of the audio essay wasn’t signposted well enough, and suggested we record new lines in order to make this better.

(4) More texture
Brian suggested some more flavor to our essay would make it more interesting.

(5) Poorly worded section
One section of dialogue was not worded very clearly and concisely, which was jarring.

(6) References
We were missing a referral to a reference list – something that needs to be present in the final cut.

 

With those six issues considered – Asha, Hazel and I went about remedying as many as possible during the lesson. Using a Zoom recorder, we each recorded new lines in attempts to remedy issues (3), (5) and (6). Issues (1), (2) and (4) all require a little more work in Audition, which I progressed onto that weekend.

The positives we took from this exercise was that we now have a better idea of how to finalize our piece. I think it was good that Brian liked the amount of information we packed into our audio essay. Another positive is that our rough cut run-time was only 4 minutes, which gives us a whole minute to work with in terms of adding more texture and new dialogue.