Evaluation - Technology 2 - Production

The most important piece of software when it came to recording and editing my extract from the BigSmoke FM Breakfast Show was Adobe Audition 1.5 - audio editing and mixing software that enables the user to add effects to recorded voices and manipulate and edit music files and sound effects - layering sounds through the mutlitrack view (which meant that I could mix sound effects, music and dialogue into one separate clip).

Once I had recorded each one of my actors using a Shure SM58 microphone (with a pop-guard to help minimise the plosive popping sound picked up during recording), I saved each separate clip in folders for each of the different sections of my show (such as news, jingles, adverts). I labelled each clip with the name of both the actor and the character they were playing from my script so that I could easily find each file when I was editing and mixing down each section.

Once everything was recorded I worked on each separate section individually, mixing one complete element, before moving onto another. I didn't work through my script chronologically but instead started with the mixing of my adverts as I knew that they would be the most complicated because of the amount of separate audio files that each contained.

For my holiday advert, for example, I placed the sound effects that I wanted (taken from the BBC Sound Effects Library) and the music track I had chosen (from the College CD Library) and placed them on the mutlitrack view roughly at the point I wanted them to appear.





I then took the unedited single voices of my female characters and the voiceover and edited out any gaps and pauses and the mistakes that had been made during recording.













Once I had removed any unwanted gaps and mistakes I re-saved each file (labelling it so that I knew that it was the edited version) before mixing the two female characters together so it appeared as if they were having a conversation (when I had actually recorded then separately, on completely different days).



I layered each of the sound clips onto the multitrack view before adjusting the volume of each separate section so that there was consistency in terms of volume across the whole advert. I then re-saved the whole advert placing it in the adverts folder so that I could place it on another multirack view when I was mixing my final show (once I had completed all the other sections).



I followed this principle with each separate section of my show, such as the intro, outro, news headlines, separate news stories, my complete news bulletin and each of my adverts and jingles. Once I had all of my separate sections mixed I placed them all in order on the multitrack view and adjusted any volume levels, before adding compression to equalise the volume across the whole show.





At points during editing I wanted to add very specific effects to some of the dialogue I recorded, such as making it seem as if a character was on the phone or that a press conference was taking place in a large echoey room. The software had certain presets so that I could add these to the clips to create the effects I wanted - as in the soundbite for the asthma story and the press conference featuring the disgraced actress.









One of the biggest challenges, apart from the adverts, was my station jingle, where I used a number of the above effects (layering lots of different audio clips onto the multitrack view and adding a phone effect to one of the voices and echo to the other). I also had to cut and loop the piece of music that I wanted to run across the jingle.