Audio 2 Project Analysis

“Practice makes perfect” has always been a quote that seems to follow me in everything I do. When I played soccer, practice makes perfect. When I sang in the choir, practicing the songs made perfect. When I first picked up a camera and started photography, practice made perfect. When we were given this interview project, I was ready to go into the life of someone who practiced something that I knew very little about. This is why I chose Sal Lievanos to teach me more about his life as a practicing tennis player.

Through this project, I gained skills on trying to make bad audio work. There were a lot of other sounds going on while I was recording audio of the guys playing tennis which made it very difficult to record. I did not have the power to ask the people driving around to stop; I had to work with it. It is not the perfect audio that I would hope for but I tried my best to incorporate it to the interview piece and make it sound good. If I were given the chance to improve it, I would maybe try to record the audio at night when there was less action on the streets going on. I was on a time crunch from being sick and the cold front was also a hurdle. Being from Texas makes it difficult to be in the cold for a long period of time and recording in the cold was a problem.

The most challenging part of the assignment was definitely the recording of audio at the tennis court. It was difficult trying to capture what I imagined when I was editing the interview in class. In total, I probably spent approximately three hours total completing this project. I am finding that audio editing is a strongpoint of mine and I enjoy doing it. I see it as a puzzle that I need to complete. I want everything to flow to perfection and that is what keeps me interested in these projects.

 

Audio 1 Project Analysis

Interviewing people has always been one of my biggest interests. I can spend hours upon hours just getting to know someone, hear their stories, and analyze their sense of humor. All of these things interest me, so when I enrolled in Media Production 2 and found out we would be interviewing different people throughout the semester…I was beyond excited.

As I was working on the first audio project, I found my previous practice in Final Cut Pro very useful. One of the new skills I learned from the project is to really listen to every aspect of the audio. One “um” or long pause could definitely bring the audio down. My goal was to make it seem like it was one continuous audio, not sound completely chopped up like it was in reality.

If I were given a second chance on this assignment, I would definitely have asked my interviewee to answer the questions in complete sentences so I could have definite beginning and endings through each question I asked. I had to go through the interview several times and cut certain words and phrases to make a complete sentence, which was a bit more difficult.

The most challenging part of the assignment was deciding what parts of the interview I wanted to use. Everything my interviewee said was very interesting to me. I am a pack rat of sorts so it took a lot out of me to get rid of quality audio in the interview. To overcome this, I put myself in an outside listener’s position. I tried to figure out what I would like to find out about a person if I had never met them before. This helped me decide what parts were more important than others in the interview.

In total, I would say that I spent six hours total in perfecting this project from start to finish. I am very proud of the end product and hope to better my skills throughout the class.