The first week of the Introduction to Broadcast Journalism module started off with audio. I have to admit that it is something new to me and I don’t feel so confident about it yet. During the first three days of this module, we did many tasks as a practise each day.
During Monday, we talked about montage, which is basically a series of shots/clips. We’ll produce them later for our final module assignment. We also discussed fair dealing and copyright, which is quite familiar to me because we’ve already learned the basics of copyright and media law regulations in the previous module. Anyway, I made some notes about the copyright, to be sure. I found out the importance of being aware of plagiarism, too. We have to be very careful with music in our video/audio projects – for example, if we do an interview in a public space, we have to avoid music at all costs, there. To be honest, that is something I haven’t thought about before. the music is essential in the audio because it illustrates the situation more. Therefore, if we want to use some music, we should look out for websites with free-download samples.
Our Monday task was to record the natural sounds of our flat – in the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room and hallway. I started in the kitchen and in the bathroom because the sound in both of them was pretty easy to record. In the bathroom, I recorded myself while brushing my hair, then I flushed the toilet, washed my hands in the washbasin and additionally recorded the shower stream. In the kitchen, I used the sound of boiling water in a kettle, a microwave and also recorded closing the fridge. One of my flatmates came to the kitchen, so you can hear her voice at the beginning of the audio. I decided to leave it like it is because we live there together and spent a lot of time in the kitchen, so it can be counted as a ‘natural’ sound in my opinion. In the end, all these sounds were very easy to make and I think if I played it to someone, they would distinguish them really quickly. Well, you can listen to them right there.
Then I moved to the hallway, where I recorded the sound while closing the doors, unlocking the doors and striding on the doormat. However, I struggled with the bedroom and living room.
I’m staying in the Halls of Residence, so basically there is no living room (to be more accurate, my bedroom is my living room haha). Anyway, I decided to discuss it with one of my flatmates, Elizabete, who was having the same issue (she was one of my classmates at that time). Later after the talk, I got back to my room with no idea at all. Then I realised the fact that I spent a lot of time in the bedroom, so there have to be many sounds that I could use. After a while, I finally came up with something. I recorded the ticking of a clock, the sound of making the bed and the sound of a teaspoon stirring the coffee. In the background, I played some music, but now I know that it was a mistake, because I didn’t have the right to use it (and that’s why I can’t post it now).
On Tuesday and Wednesday, we learned more about montages and later also about audiograms, which are short samples of audio with an image. After listening to a variety of podcasts and watching many clips, it was our turn to make our own montages and audiograms. So I decided to use the audio clips from Monday morning and edit them in Adobe Audition on Wednesday afternoon (at that time I went on-site and it was quite exciting as it was the first time I’ve been on campus). The session was great, I met a few classmates, did some editing with Matt’s help I made an audiogram about the universities during the coronavirus pandemic. I used some clips from youtube, which was quite challenging because I couldn’t record the audio in Adobe Audition. Later I found that I had to disable my mic but I was struggling for a while. I posted it on my SoundCloud account. There you can listen to it.
Overall, I have learned the basics of making audio clips, audiograms, etc. while using Adobe Auditon and attended my first on-site lecture. The tutors encouraged us to come up with some ideas for our final assignment. I liked the idea of students living at the Halls during Covid-19, but I didn’t make a decision right after because I wanted to make some space for other ideas (if there were any).
