Final Audio Story

Hi there! This unit is about using Audition to create audio stories. I decided to do an interview that focused on event hosting for my audio story. I did this because Collect is all about inspiring people to gather creatively in their area. Not only do I want to host events, but I want to give people resources to plan their own! 

I chose an interview format because of the conversational nature of it and because I like things that are relatively straight forward when providing information. I also really appreciate list Podcasts where you are going through a list of key points or lessons. I ruled out something in the list format so I could get others involved.

I started off by drafting a couple questions centered around the idea of what makes a great event. I then asked two of my friends to meet downtown at You and Yours distillery to talk all things event planning. My friend Erica has been in the hospitality industry for over 10 years and my friend Ashley just started a design inspiration Instagram called Reed and Rye. Check out her stuff for some crazy decor inspo!

When we arrived at the venue it was relatively quiet, but that quickly changed and so we actually wound up recording the interview in my car just outside. I used one of the pro tips from the readings and recorded about a minute of ambient noise for the background before we headed out. The rest of the audio I recorded in my living room. Check out the below for the walk though of my technical process.

• I used my iPhone for all recordings
• I interviewed Ashley and Erica separately in my car and was then able to upload their tracks individually and then edit out me asking the questions.
• I then recorded a sound bite all together with both of them thanking them to get a natural organic ending to the recording sesh.
• I created a muti-track session in Audition and uploaded all these pieces included the rerecorded bits of me in my living room asking questions.
• The ambient noise fades in after my introduction to the interview and fades out at the end of the session.
• I begin the audio clip with an intro I recorded at a later date in my living room.
• Once all 5 tracks (Ashley, Erica, Me, Conclusion, Ambient noise) were uploaded I began to hack away. The goal was to act as if they were both answering the same questions at the same time. Each of their individual interviews was about 3 minutes in length so I razored a lot out.
• I added the intro at the beginning, edited the middle portion of them answering my spliced in questions, and then added in the reordered conclusion portion we recorded all together. All of this was layered over the ambient noise.

After received some substantial feedback last week I decided to make the below edits to my story:

• The first thing I did was remove the question related to San Diego Parks. I received multiple feedback suggestions that it seemed out of place with the rest of the story. I agree for this specific topic/podcast because I imagine it being listened to by people not in San Diego
• Secondly, I was asked by a few folks to add music. It was hard to find a free one that I was very keen on, but I finally selected a track from https://freemusicarchive.org . It is a track called Bless Life by Ketsa. I added this music for the intro and conclusion and included a fade in and out.
• Since I added the music and because multiple people suggested the ambient noise was distracting, I removed that track.
• Next I re-recorded the intro to give more of a back story to the interview. This included setting it up more up as a podcast and communicating more of how it was related to Collect. I also added a sort of sign off to make the ending more formal.
• To clean up the overall sound I used the de-noise and de-hum features. They didn’t work well on every clip, so I see the importance of getting good audio from the get go, much like getting a good photo from the get go for Photoshop.
• Finally, I played extensively with the volume levels for each clip hoping to get them as close as I could to uniform.

I really hope you enjoy the interview with the new additions! 🙂