The Dilemma
Do you ever surprise yourself? Ever do something you weren’t sure you were able to do, only to be shocked in the end? At the beginning of the year when we went through the syllabus for our multimedia class, I was intimidated. The projects that we were given, while I found them exciting, scared the shit out of me.
I’d never given serious effort to designing elements of multimedia before. Don’t get me wrong, I had read the course description, and I knew, kind of, what might be asked of us, but seeing it in print was a whole other monster. In the print portion of our design, I knew I could do well. I’m a strong writer. I know that. And even designing the basic website wouldn’t be so much trouble, I reasoned. But the rest?
Design and record some sort of audio segment. Wow…okay. I had no idea how to do that. I’d never done that sort of thing before. I didn’t know how well I would do. I accepted the challenge, though, and decided to give it my best.
What you have the chance to listen to below is just that. Not a perfect recording, nor a marvel in audio mixing and editing, but a great effort at the task at hand. For this project, I wanted to do something different. I didn’t want to record a series of sounds strung together. Not that that wouldn’t have been good, but it just wasn’t what I would do. I wanted something different and creative.
The Design
So, I decided to interview myself. I set out first by writing a script. A series of questions and answers with myself. I thought about how an interview would work. The interviewer talks 15% or less of the time, the interviewee talks 85% or more. Once I had the separate parts recorded, I went to work editing them. I cleared out the mouse clicks and the background noise from each set. Once that was complete I started to splice where I could. From the end of the recording to the first draft of editing and mixing, it took me almost five hours. The end product for the first draft was almost thirty minutes long.
Cut the Fluff, Kill your Darlings
These are two popular terms in many different disciplines of art, and they both refer to the same thing: cutting out parts of your work that, while you think are good (and possibly great), don’t add to your work. The first thing I set out to do was cut the majority of the stupid jokes I’d made. Silences were next. Parts that didn’t make sense, or didn’t move the narrative along. But something was missing. The transitions between segments felt flat. So I left the project for a while, choosing to allow my subconscious work on the idea without my meddling.
The solution came to be quickly, it was obvious. The sound of pages flipping through a book. Subtle, yet satisfying. Finally, I had done a sound I could use.
The Finished Product
So, without further ado or interruption, I present to you the completed product. The whole thing took almost nine hours of work, but I think it was worth it! Please enjoy! And don’t forget, follow me on Twitter (twitter.com/AJ_Jones_Author), on Instagram (instagram.com/realajjones), and download my book, too!