Assignment 3: Audio Story Final

This assignment was challenging! As you may already know, the purpose of my blog is to give you all a behind-the-scenes look at live entertainment. This time, I was tasked to do so in audio story form.

As I spent several days pondering what I was going to do for this project, my number one challenge was how to capture the excitement of live entertainment without being able to use music recorded from a show. I debated doing another interview with Tad, the Entertainment and Events Manager at the Gala Showroom. However, I felt like that would be a bit more procedural and technical – yes, we could cover what we do during a show, but it wouldn’t capture the excitement!

When I think about working in live entertainment, I often think about my very first day on the job and how fun it was. From a young age, I was an avid concert-goer and I’ve always loved live music. When I was given the opportunity to get my foot in the door of the live entertainment industry, I jumped at the chance! It was like a dream come true, and I’ve had so many interesting experiences along the way, but I still think back to that very first day….

That’s when I decided that I wanted to take you with me back to my first day on the job! I wanted to focus on feelings and emotions rather than the complicated technical functions that go into everyday work as a live entertainment or AV (Audio Visual) technician. What better way to capture that excitement than going back to when everything was new?

Once I had my idea, I had to figure out how to execute it. I planned out some bullet points that I wanted to cover and sounds I wanted to capture, then I set out to record. I went to the Gala Showroom to record different ambient sounds, including the segment where I’m walking up the stairs. It was difficult to condense my story into a beginning, middle, and end, because I’m still a working technician! However, I did my best to stick to the high points of that first day at work and discuss how it motivated me to pick live entertainment as my work of choice. Even though I primarily work in the marketing profession, live entertainment is where my heart is, and that’s the day my journey started.

So far, this is the project for COM 561 that underwent the most drastic changes between the draft and the final. For the final, I incorporated much of the feedback I received (thank you everyone!) by adding musical elements and more ambient sounds. Plus, I re-recorded my entire voice over! My reasons for doing so included being dissatisfied with the draft voice over, where I had to record in different conditions and at different times. As an audio editor, I could clearly hear the difference in the clips, and I was sure others would be able to as well. As per the feedback, I was correct in that assumption. This would not do! I wanted a voice over that sounded consistent, clear, and enthusiastic throughout my story!

I went back to the beginning, choosing to transcribe the draft audio into a written document, crafting a different, more descriptive intro. Then, I recorded all of it in one take with my smartphone. I emailed the file to myself, uploaded it into my Audition project, then isolated the file to reduce noise and limit the audio levels to -3db. Prior to making more adjustments, I incorporated a music file I found on Freesound.org to serve as an intro and outro for my story. I adjusted the fade in/fade out for the file and lowered the volume considerably so it would not be drastically louder than the narration.

I still needed more ambient sound!

I chose to return to Freesound.org to find a good guitar solo and audience cheer for the part of the story where I discuss the excitement of live entertainment. I wanted to capture the “live music” feeling without overwhelming the narration. I adjusted the sound levels and fades accordingly.

I’m very happy with how my final audio story turned out and I hope you enjoy it as well! I’m including all links to the Freesound.org files at the end of this post:

https://freesound.org/people/abett/sounds/316703/
https://freesound.org/people/karolist/sounds/370934/
https://freesound.org/people/mrrap4food/sounds/619036/