Audio interviews and Audacity

So our project for this week was quite interesting. We got a reference librarian as an interviewee. At first I thought there wouldn't be enough sounds to record at a quiet library, but you never notice all the noise that goes on there... dozens of students typing, pencils being sharpened, pages being leafed through, even footsteps. I think we got a pretty good b-roll going, considering we recorded in a place that was supposed to be quiet.

Our librarian was great--she was able to talk for a good amount of time, and she was really good at talking fluidly. Editing the interview with Audacity, however, was kind of harder than I thought--I've never worked with that application before. It's cool how you can edit stuff out and merge background noise and talking, though. It's just finding out exactly what you need to eliminate and making sure you're not deleting too many things that's hard. But hopefully we'll work with sound more in the future.

I'm kind of excited to start learning multimedia. I've always liked taking pictures, though I've never gotten into editing them much or making them into journalism. I've never really blogged, though I've sort of started a blog last year; it only has one entry. I can usually never think of what to write about.

The multimedia stories I've watched recently really showed me that certain stories are much more effective with pictures, sound, and video rather than just print. Last class, we watched the story on mediastorm.com about the legacy of Chernobyl, which I found really powerful. The shocking pictures of mutated children, as well as the interviews, really showed the impact of the disaster--something that would be impossible to show in just print. What the interviewee said at the end was also kind of scary--he said that they say something like Chernobyl will never happen again, but things break, and we never know. I can really say it's one of the most powerful videos I've ever watched.

Another nice video I've seen recently, at http://masteringmultimedia.wordpress.com/, is about injured war veterans. I really liked the way the facts and statistics are covered by a voice-over by a reporter, while letting the interviewees tell the human side of the story. This is a good technique, as the veterans being interviewed are there to explain their experience, rather than tell solid information on how many people have been injured, etc. I was watching a local news channel the other day, and half of their interview time was the people telling statistics rather than something human. I found that kind of boring, since I was expecting them to say more about their reactions to what happened.

Overall, though, I'm looking forward to learning how to work with multimedia , as great stories can come out of that. I think it might be hard to edit stuff though, after you've gotten all the footage. It might be difficult deciding what things to cut out and what's important to the story enough to keep. Hopefully combining sound, still photos and video into one project won't turn out too challenging at the end.