Leanne
Stone
production
recording my sfx;
Above is a photo of me recording each of my five sounds. I had to record these on my iPhone voice memos app due to portability being easier on my phone rather than my mic. When recording the sounds I had to make sure I had a quiet environment so that there was no noticeable background noise. My next concern was to make sure the mic was pointing towards the sound source, this proved more difficult for sound effects where I would be moving around to create the sound (for example making the cereal) I tried to leave some room before the sound effect started to give room for noise reduction. I also did a few takes of each to give more variety and option for my audio drama. I then imported these files into my groups google drive ready to edit together to create my audio drama.
editing my audio;
progression screengrabs;
Above are the screengrabs from my time editing in audacity. As you can see in the screengrabs, I decided to make sure I had some order to my audacity file. I first converted my files to WAV files to easily import them into audacity. First off I wanted to set the scene of where my characters were, I imported dining room ambience off of freesound.org, looping this for as long as necessary. I recorded the news audio I needed in my house and used this also to echo tiffany watching something. I then had two tracks for sound effects so I could layer effects if necessary and on track for the dialogue between characters. I had printed off the script for the audio drama and highlighted the main sound effects needed. I went through chronologically and imported audio as it was needed, cutting the audio to the bit I needed and doing any noise effects that was needed. I would then move this into place on the track timeline, and do any final adjustments including noise effects, cutting, copy and pasting etc etc. I was happy with this process as it allowed me to perfect each part of my audio drama at a time and go back, making changes and choosing a different sound effect if I wasn't completely satisfied with the one I had originally chosen. I also found myself recording any sounds I felt I needed that hadn't already been recorded using my condenser microphone. To the right are a couple photo of me doing this. examples of this include the bowls, tv and placing down of the cereal etc. I also found myself on freesound.org for any sounds I felt were necessary that I couldn't record myself, but this was minimal.
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using noise effects;
Whilst editing my audio drama, I got to experiment with new noise effects and tools within audacity. The one I most commonly used which you can see in most of my screengrabs is the envelop tool. I found this to be the most useful tool out of the three main effects I was using on my audio. I was able to use this to reduce the overall amplification of sounds that were too loud compared to the rest of my track. This also meant I could easily create fade ins and outs, where the drama would start and finish but also with sounds that started further away and came closer to the microphone. I will be using this tool a lot more in future. One of the the other effects i found useful was the amplification effect. I used this to make sounds louder when they were too quiet compared to the rest of my audio. I used this mostly for Brett's audio as compared to Tiffany's it was quite quiet. The other major tool I use was the noise reduction effect. After taking a one second section from any effect and applying the noise profile to the rest of the sound it gets rid of the background fuzz being produced. I was only able to do this on clips with a reasonable amount of time between the sound effect. This proved useful to remove the fuzz of my fridge from the cereal making audio.