Audio 1

Brief

To produce a radio trailer for a radio programme with an accompanying report. The programme must last exactly one minute long and must demonstrate an understanding of audio production.

The Group Work

After discussing various options, our group came to the decision that our radio station would advertise comedy shows so that we could employ a number of effects such as reverb for phone pranks, laughter and screams. We wanted our radio programmes to be aimed at an adult audience so we decided they would be scheduled to play at 7 on a weekday.

We assigned individual roles and decided to meet up for an hour each week to bring our individual work together. We came to the agreement that Mike was to be responsible for creating the introduction to the radio station using GarageBand. This was done using the loops "bluesy electric guitar" and "electric drum beat". This was saved as an mp3 file so it could be transferred to Adobe Audition later on.

Liam and I were responsible for putting the sound clips together, changing the volume levels, removing any unwanted sounds from the recordings, and adding reverb and other effects to the clips to give the radio trailer a more professional sound.

After we had established each of our roles and created a script, we began to record the voice clips. This was done using a h2 hand recorder with a muffler on to reduce unwanted noises. We used the stand for the recorder so it could be left on the floor so that there were no noises resulting from the speaker holding the microphone. The recorder was set to record from the front of the microphone only because we only needed to record the speaker's voice and no other background sounds. The recordings took place in a small room with soft furnishings in order to absorb sound and therefore minimise echo.

Once the voice recordings were complete, we transferred them to the PC and it was my job to clean up the clips by cutting them down and renaming them using the edit mode in Adobe Audition. This was done so that we could easily find them when we needed to put the clips with the bedding. If any of the voice clips had clicks or pops in them, they were edited in Audacity and the effect "normalise" was added to them to remove the unwanted sounds.

After trimming and normalising the raw clips, they were all opened up in Adobe Audition and put together using the structure in the original script. However, when we listened to it, we decided that we needed to make some changes to the order of the clips. This was because the structure of the clips for the "Fonespammer" trailer was exactly the same to the "Distraction" trailer which made it repetitive and uninteresting.

The length of the pauses between each clip were carefully thought out. For example, we left a longer pause when the female is thinking about the answer to the question as opposed to the pause left in between the programme titles and preview clips; these were shorter so that the trailer would be quick and keep the audience interested.

We also decided to end the trailer with a reminder of the radio station name, aswell as opening the trailer with the station name and frequency. This was in case a listener started listening to the trailer halfway through and wanted to know which radio station they were listening to.

Because each voice recording was on its own track and recorded on different occasions, it was necessary to adjust the volume of each track so that they were all at the same level. This was also done in Adobe Audition, this time using a volume adjustment tool. In addition to the voice recordings, the volume of the bedding (backing track) also had to be altered. When a voice clip started, the volume of the bedding had to be lowered so that the voice could be heard clearly and to ensure that the background music was not overpowering. We decided to lower the volume most during the programme snippets so that the listener could differentiate between the snippets and the remainder of the trailer. However, we did not mute the track completely because we wanted to show that the clips were all part of the same advertisement.

New recordings were required for some parts of the trailer because of a few factors such as the speaker being too close to the microphone creating unwanted sounds when the letters p and b were spoken. For part of our trailer, we also needed to create the effect of a speaker on the other end of the phone. To create this effect, we added reverb to the clip so that it wouldn't sound like it had been recorded in a studio.

Once the whole trailer was assembled and we were happy with it as a group, we published it in Adobe Audition as an mp3 file so that we were able to burn it to a CD.

The revised script can be found here.

Audio 1

Brief

The Group Work

Semester One

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