I used Adobe Audacity to record my voiceover and edit the documentary. I did this over four full-days in the radio studio and a large proportion of that time was spent making small changes to my script or shuffling the order of the interviewees in order to get a better finished product.
Initially I wanted to hear from three or four of the students that I had interviewed but, realised pretty quickly, much of the seven minutes would have been eaten up as a result. Therefore I made the decision to focus on two students and two universities: I felt this would better strike the balance of identifying core themes (that could later be explored on the website) but also allowing us to hear at greater length from the individuals.
I was keen to ensure, given the focus of the documentary is on the student experience in engaging with services, that student voices were the first and last the listener heard (aside from my intro and outro).
Not much editing of the interviews had to be conducted as I had previously made notes of the time-points at which I felt the key quotes were. In the studio all I needed to do was trim them down, remove some 'erms' and 'ahs' and then normalise the levels to -3db so that everyone was speaking at a standardised volume.
The biggest issue I had was softening the plosives in interviews where myself, and the interviewee, had hit some hard P's: this was a very time consuming process of going back and forth within the waveform chiselling away at the excerpt until it sounds softer and more natural. In fact I probably spent more time in the studio doing this than any other element of recording or editing.
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