The latest project I was assigned was to create an Audio Story related to my topic using Adobe Audition. I had only used Audition for the tutorials, but found it to be easy to work with and a nice change of pace for a new project!
I began by reading through our class materials and looking at the different formats I could potentially use for my audio story. I wrote down ideas of what I could do and of what I envision the audio to be like. I decided to interview a current rescue owner to have her story be the focus of my audio, this way it could serve to promote the importance of rescuing. My audio story is a podcast for Pawsitive Rescue, my animal shelter, which I will share on our website so potential clients and past ones can hear stories of others that have rescued. (Pawsitive Rescue is a dream of mine, not an actual rescue shelter at the moment)
I chose to interview Allison, my supervisor from work, who rescued her dog Lexi about 7 years ago. I thought she would be perfect for this because she often mentions her to me in our conversations and truly embodies a successful rescue story. I wrote down a list of questions and gave them to her to review, this way she had an idea of what to expect before we sat down to record the interview. These are some of the questions:
- Tell me a little bit about yourself.
- What made you decide to get a dog?
- When thinking of getting a pet, did you always consider rescuing or was buying from a store/puppy mill an option for you? Why or why not?
- What drew you to pick Lexi?
- Looking back at your decision to rescue, are you glad you did? Would you do anything differently?
- What is the best thing about Lexi? Give a funny story or memory if you’d like.
To record her I used an USB attachable microphone that I plugged into my laptop. We sat in a small meeting room at work that I reserved and started the conversation. I was left with about 8 minutes of material to use, which I was happy about but also a bit nervous to edit. I later also recorded myself giving an intro to the audio story as well as different sounds that I could incorporate, like dog barks and squeaky toy sounds.
Once I had my audio, I began the editing process on Audition. This took some time since I had different audios to put together and edit. I made sure to cut out any “um’s” and long pauses by using the razor tool, which breaks the audio up, and to remove any unnecessary sounds or parts of the audio that I did not want to use. In some parts of the video it was a bit difficult to cut the audio to remove an “um” or “like” since they were used so close to the next word, so I struggled a bit with some transitions for my draft.
Feedback and Changes:
I received some feedback on my draft from fellow classmates, and decided to make some changes to my audio to help improve the quality and delivery of the message. It was suggested I remove some of the humming noise in the background during Allison’s story, and also that I add some music to enhance the overall feel of the audio. I really appreciated the feedback as it touched on parts of my audio that would benefit from these changes.
After reviewing my audio a couple of times with the feedback I was given in mind, I was ready to start editing my draft. I went on to remove most of the humming noise in the background first by following some instructions from one of our readings. This really improved the sound and transition from my intro to Allison’s story.
To add some music to my audio I looked on FreeSound to find something that would go well with my audio story. For my intro I picked an upbeat audio and added a fade in and fade out effect. For the duration of the story I chose a piano playing in the background, a slow and calming sound, this I believe gave Allison’s story and the overall audio story more emotion. I added a fade out at the end and let the piano audio play a little bit after my conclusion so the audio didn’t abruptly end along with the music.
Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment and hope you like my final Audio Story!
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Music Source:
The music used was downloaded from FreeSound under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licenses.
Intro music can be found here, it is titled ‘Smooth intro’ by Trev Lewis from Hagfilms.
Music playing during the story is by ShadyDave, the song is title ‘My love (piano loop)’ and the link to the song can be found here.
