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Follow along and join the Discussion on Lisa’s travels |
Intro from Jay Allison
Lisa Tharpe is on a journey. She’s taking a year’s leave from her teaching job to make her own “personal independent study in radio…making it up as I go along, traveling around the country visiting friends and family and random interesting places, interviewing anyone who will let me.” As part of our “Beginnings” series, Transom will follow Lisa’s progress. She’ll post along the way; you can ask her questions and travel with her vicariously.
From Lisa Tharpe
Why radio? I like to talk. I like telling stories. I love listening to stories. Radio seemed like a perfect fit. What I have found is that I am good at getting people to talk to me, particularly strangers. I am not so good at turning bits of sound, anecdotes, and thoughts into actual stories. I have spent the last decade drilling basic story structure: beginning-middle-end, character, problem/solution, (surprise if possible) into the heads of literally hundreds of 8 and 9 year-olds and yet I’m having an incredibly hard time practicing what I’ve preached. I’ve got the sounds but how do I turn those sounds/interviews into stories? I’m becoming more comfortable with the technical aspects, though my learning curve here has been dishearteningly steep, but the crafting of narrative and getting a piece to "flow" is daunting.
Over the past six months, drifting between family and friends and five states, I have managed to collect hours and hours of tape. I record everything that catches my ear: airport restrooms, slamming lockers, bees, trains, even my dry hands. I have interviewed anyone willing to let me put a microphone very close to their face including a large animal veterinarian, a born-again hipster artist living in the Chelsea Hotel, a philosopher, and my paternal grandmother (who I hadn’t spoken to in 24 years). What I need to do now is take some of that tape and make something out of it.
I’ll stay here in Ann Arbor for a few weeks then head back to San Francisco for Christmas with my mother and, hopefully, a few weeks of intense editing and story making. Then to Colorado to see my father who I haven’t seen in 19 years. A trip to Europe is in the works as is a road trip through the Pacific Northwest. I’m trying to just let things happen so any or all of this is subject to change. I like the idea of virtual company so, please, come along and put in your two cents.
Thanks to the lovely people at Transom, I have the next six months to work through my audio ordeals and epiphanies in a public forum. Hopefully, I’ll get suggestions, insight, and prodding from you, my readers, and some technical help from the masters at Transom. You are cordially invited to come along for what is sure to be a bumpy ride.
Tech Info
My friend Mitch has loaned me a Sharp MD-SR60, an audio-technica AT822 stereo mic, a very heavy mic stands that looks dangerous in an X-ray machine, all of the cables to hook everything together, and a lovely black bag to carry it all in. He even threw in fifteen 80-minute mini discs.
I purchased Sony MDR-7506 headphones, a Beyer M58 dynamic mic. My 2003 iBook died shortly after I embarked on this adventure. So I got a Apple MacBook. I love my MacBook but I’ve had to send it back to Apple twice since getting it in late July. I use GarageBand, which came with the computer, for editing.
About Lisa Tharpe
Lisa Tharpe
I enjoy sleeping, eating, talking to strangers, sitting in museums, roaming farmer’s and flea markets, visiting new places, and hanging out in my kayak. I have spent the last eleven years teaching third and fourth graders in the San Francisco Unified School District.
Day Two (7/14/08)
I will never understand the desire to create arctic indoor climates in regions with blood boiling outdoor temperatures. Having learned my lesson the day before, I arrived at CDS tightly bundled. I was also a little late having stopped for a southern breakfast of eggs, bacon, and grits at Elmo’s. I saw Brian waiting for me as I headed toward the auditorium for the morning’s lecture. Turns out the date we’d been given for our interview was incorrect. The interview would be that afternoon rather than the next day as we’d expected. The morning was filled with lectures but if we worked through lunch we’d have almost two hours to combine and fine-tune our lists of questions and decide how and where we’d conduct the interview.
The first session was devoted to how to get the best possible recording. The highlights being – get close but not too close, check your levels, wear your headphones (wear your headphones, wear your headphones), and have extras of everything.
An eye opener for me was hearing that meter readings should peak somewhere between minus 12 and minus 6. I’d been recording well above that since once my audio was imported into GarageBand everything seemed much quieter than when I’d listened directly through my minidisc.
Those with flash recorders were reminded not to record in mp3 since that would give them ten times less information to work with than recording in wav or aiff.
We were also reminded to always, always, always record room-tone (background sound) at the end of our interviews. John explained that the 1 –2 minutes of background sound could end up being they key to creating a smooth, professional sounding piece. (Sure enough, our two minutes of howling air conditioner noise would be put to good use.)
I wrote AUDIO HIJACK in big letters on the corner of my notes (there is a pay version and a free version). This software lets you record any audio that comes through your computer – music, YouTube videos, a conversation on skype, whatever. (We’d end up using this beautifully simple software to record background sounds for our scenes.)
David Schulman led the second morning session on Interviewing Techniques. I realize that reading someone else’s notes is like reading TV Guide instead of watching the show but here are some of the things I scrawled in my notebook:
Know your:
Audience – How will you get to know your audience?
Tools – How can your tools help you shape your work?
Medium – How will your work be consumed?
Radio is unrelentingly linear. If the listener misses something she can’t go back. How does your work address this?
How is an interview different from a conversation?
In an interview -
the interviewer is/should be in control
the interviewer has an agenda.
structure and rhythm are important.
An interview has a beginning and an ending.
Transitions are key!
Circle around the subject until you get what you want.
Awkward silences can work in your favor.
Be prepared but be open.
You don’t want to go into an interview knowing everything.
Keep pushing to get the interviewee to say what you need them to say. Remind them that they need to fill in the blanks for the listener.
The gap between experiencing something and being told is almost unbridgeable. The key to a good documentary is bridging that gap.
Host Intro – How are you going to pull the audience in? One/two ideas you really want to get across. Factual/contextual stuff you don’t want to deal with.
I had never really given much thought to the host intro before. Listening to David talk I realized how important the host intro is for setting up a piece. I also realized that the intro was what was missing from the pieces I’d heard the day before. All of them seemed to start mid-stream; I didn’t have the information I needed to make sense of the stories from the get-go. I’d had to wade into each piece and fish around a bit. Remembering how I felt listening to those pieces made me consider how much work a good host intro can do to prep the listener and lead them into the story, sort of like a flashlight on a path before your eyes have adjusted to the darkness.
Brian and I worked through lunch, coming up with questions and deciding we’d both ask them. While we had two pages of questions we didn’t have a clue what sort of story we wanted to tell. David had talked about throwing in some leftfield questions to liven things up so we added – Do you know any good polling/pollster jokes? What song should begin/end this interview? Who would you want to play you in the in the movie of your life? – to our list of more staid questions – What is political polling? How much influence/power do polls have? Has the Internet changed polling?
Next we needed to decide how and where to record our interview. Both of our recording options had downsides. My minidisc did not like humidity and Brian’s Zoom H2 was still in the box. Hoping to cut our losses, we decided that we’d both record the interview. I’d close mic the professor (with my spanking new birthday Audio -Technica 8035) and Brian would position the Zoom on the table between us. Deciding on a location proved more difficult. We’d be interviewing professor Bacot at CDS but each of the rooms we had to choose from had a distinct drawback – close to a loud hallway/bathroom, an unturnoffable cooling system, cavernous or claustrophobically small. We chose the unturnoffable cooling system.
With all crucial decisions made we set up our interview room then waited. Mr. Bacot arrived promptly at 2:00. He was tall and handsome with a silky, southern drawl. While Brian and I had worried that the interview would be dry or worse, dull, we found our subject to be easygoing, informative and entertaining. Our 30-minute interview stretched into 80 minutes. We winked and smiled at each other when we’d hear something that seemed destined to be included in the final piece.
At 78 minutes I was almost out of “tape” and had to stop, save, and put in a new disc. Without the shotgun mic pointing at him, Professor Bacot seemed more relaxed so Brian continued to ask questions. The answers to these off-the-cuff questions elicited more happy grins. After a few more minutes we thanked professor Bacot for his time then eagerly pressed play on our respective machines to hear what we’d recorded. It was quickly clear that my recording would be unusable. The recording dipped in and out sometimes every few seconds sometimes after longer intervals. Brian had somehow written over the last few minutes of the interview but other than that his recording sounded great. We gloated about how well the interview had gone and how fortunate we were to have gathered so much tape then realized we’d have to log it all.
Tomorrow – How much I hate logging tape.
Day Three (7/15)
I woke up at 6:00 to get in two hours of logging before class. Added to the three hours I’d put in the day before meant a total of five hours logging 26 minutes and 9 seconds of tape. I felt compelled to transcribe every word, which, being a two-fingered typist, required listening to every sentence at least twice sometimes more. What had seemed riveting during the interview with a dynamic and personable interviewee seated before me sounded less so alone at my computer. Worse, his silky drawl meant that words flowed into each other and were too frequently implied rather than spoken. I wanted to write down exactly what he’d said because in summary it seemed like we had a lot of good stuff but the actual tape wasn’t so clear. I left for class wondering how I could have so much tape and so little to choose from.
When I arrived at CDS Brian was also concerned about our prospects. We’d been listening to a lot of non-narrated work and had just assumed that that’s what we’d do. From what we’d logged so far it was pretty clear that we’d be hard pressed to come up with a listenable and coherent two minutes. The good news was that Brian was much farther along on the logging than I was. He’d gotten through 46 minutes of tape. His 46 minutes took up just over a page, double-spaced. My 26 minutes consumed just over seven single-spaced pages.
Brian’s log: 25:55 when a campaign releases an internal poll, people will be suspect of it
My log: 25:51 Most people, when a campaign releases an internal poll they will grow suspect of it. But at the same time a group that has the same ideological perspective with the same agenda will release a poll and everybody will believe it.
Clearly I was delusional and wasting my time. I vowed to repeat the mantra “logging is not transcribing” the next time I felt inspired to do a word for word transcription.
Fortunately for me discussions of proper logging technique would have to wait until after lunch.
The first morning session was devoted to ethics. We watched Elizabeth Barret’s film Stranger With A Camera about the aftermath of the shooting of a documentary filmmaker and the responsibility documentarians/journalists have to those they document.
The film brought up notions of fairness and truthfulness, who has the right to represent whom, and who has access to the means to do the documenting? Days and books could be devoted to these subjects so I’m going to leave them for someone else to cover.
The second session of the day focused on Collaboration and was presented by Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler the two best dressed women in the center who complemented each other so seamlessly it was hard to imagine they hadn’t known each other since birth.
The tips they gave seemed useful whether working with a partner or on your own:
Log the tape separately, each person marking the sections they want to use. Then compare notes. If you’ve both marked the same tape that’s probably tape you’ll want to use.
Once you’ve done the logging and the starring/highlighting of the best tape sit down together and decide what the story’s about. What’s your best tape? Has the story changed since conducting your interview?
How are you going to tell the story? Narrated? Non-narrated? Do you have the tape to tell the story you want to tell? Who’s going to narrate the piece? What style will the piece be? Newsy? Reflective? Humorous?
Who will your characters be?
What do you think should be the beginning, middle, and end of your piece? What’s the climax? Be as specific as possible about these.
On the technical side they recommended devoting the top track of your session to your raw tape then copying sections as needed. That way you can easily find what you’re looking for when referring to your log and you can never lose tape.
When passing versions/sessions back and forth always save as you go. IE our piece was called PoliticalPolling so the first version was PoliticalPolling1 when Brian started working on it on his own he started a new session called PoliticalPolling_Brian2. When it was my turn to work I started a new session called PoliticalPolling _Lisa3.
After leading us through their helpful hand-out, Ann and Kara had us break into groups and give brief descriptions of our pieces – Who’s doing what and why should we care? Brian and I found ourselves at a bit of a loss. We didn’t know what we wanted to say or how we wanted to say it. We knew we didn’t have a non-narrated piece but we didn’t know how we’d bring ourselves into the piece either.
In my notes I wrote:
Do poll-takers have integrity?
Bring in the boredom factor?
Bring our own preconceptions in?
Polling sounds/TV polls
Do a faux phone poll
The first 5 words that come to mind when I think of our tape”
Blood
Influence
Power
Integrity
Voice
LUNCH
After lunch we had “free” time to conduct interviews, log tape and start thinking about our host intros. I heard a rumor that there was free software that allowed you slow down your tape to allow for easier logging. The software, Express Scribe lets you slow down your tape to whatever level you chose (90%, 72%, 60%…) I quickly downloaded the software (10 minutes from finding the site to using the software) Unfortunately, my typing is so slow I had to slow the audio down to about 60% of normal speed in order to keep up. At that speed the audio is painful to listen to. I repeated my mantra “logging is not transcribing” and slogged away with Express Scribe set to 80% of normal speed.
Brian finished his log when I reached about the half-way point. We decided to save time and use his log then followed Ann and Kara’s advice and each marked the sections we wanted to use. When we compared notes I had marked everything Brian had but I’d also included a lot he hadn’t. I held my ground on most of the additional tape.
We were now certain that we didn’t have enough for a non-narrated piece nor were we any closer to knowing what our story would be. A straight news piece about political polling would be dry, something we did not want. We could try to make light of the dry nature of our material but we didn’t want to make fun of our subject. If we were going to make fun of anyone we’d have to make fun of ourselves. Beginning, middle, end? No idea. We considered conducting our own poll or maybe going out on the street and asking people to tell us their thoughts on political polling. Maybe we could come up with something impressionistic? I asked John if any past participants had been unable to finish their piece. He said that pieces had been lost but other than that all previous participants had managed to complete something. It was only day three, coming up with a story could wait until day four. We went to dinner.
That evening Ann and Kara played us some of their work and talked about their process. Someone asked how long it took them to complete a piece from start to finish. The question was hard to answer because they usually worked on more than on piece at a time but they gave an example of a seven minute piece about African immigrants and said it had taken them about ten days. Ten days of them both working, more or less full time. Many of us gasped audibly. The day before, David Schulman had said he put about a week of fulltime work into each of his five minute Musicians in Their Own Worda pieces. His timeline included doing research, setting up interviews, recording, and editing. The message of the evening: Audio documentary – not for the faint of heart.
Tomorrow – ProTools, Script Writing, Thinking in Scenes, Pain and Heart Ache
The first few lines of my notes remind me of the diamond poems I used to have my students write (not the poems just the shape).
Pro Tools
Non-destructive editing
Mini is ok, don’t get micro
File -new session
Title your session (make sure you know where you’ve stored it)
Audio file type = WAV
Sample Rate = 44.1
Bit Depth = 16
Save
We started the morning with an introduction to ProTools. I sat in the auditorium looking at the large screen in front of the room and wishing I were in the computer lab. John assured us that we would have plenty of time for hands-on practice and that experience had shown him that turning us loose now would only result in chaos. I didn’t believe him but I sat and listened and took notes anyway.
Even before opening my first PT session it was clear that I was about to enter a brighter more dazzling realm of the editing world. I’d been using GarageBand which is paper and pencil to the word processor that is ProTools (or Audition). Of course, some of the best literature ever written was done the old fashioned way but setting up a Word document is a whole lot easier (for most of us) than sitting down with a number two pencil and a yellow legal pad, fancy fonts and bright colors are nifty too. I can’t even image than damage I’d do with tape and a razorblade.
When I finally opened my first ProTools session it was less scary than I had expected, though still a bit overwhelming. The cutting and pasting were pretty similar to GarageBand but PT allowed for much finer edits and provided a whole lot more to work with. It was also clear that, unlike GarageBand, an investment of more than an afternoon would be necessary to get beyond the most basic functions. Our instructors confessed that even after months (even years) of using ProTools they were still finding new functions and short cuts.
When it came time to load our audio we loaded all 80-minutes. Brian hadn’t known how to create shorter tracks as he recorded so we had to load everything. Fortunately, with the Zoom H2 we could just drag and drop the whole file unlike with my minidisc, which would have required loading the audio in real time. We loaded all our audio onto the first (top) track and then started copying the clips we’d marked the day before into a second track. Ann and Kara’s suggestion of leaving the original audio untouched made quick work of pulling our clips. After pulling everything we’d starred we had just over 90 seconds. I was jealous of the groups who had 15 minutes of “great” audio. All they needed to do was cut. We needed to figure out how to grow our audio. How to turn 90 seconds of sound bites into a 2-4 minute story. John and Shea encouraged us to think in scenes, discreet moments defined by music, ambient sound, or described by the narrator or interviewee.
We decided to leave the script/story for later and started looking for background sounds. I thought we should have chittering cicadas to put the listener in the south and we both wanted polling sounds so we set to work gathering sounds instead of beginning our script and coming up with a host intro.
Breaking down of the day:
9 – 10:30 ProTools I: Create Session, trax, load audio
Break
10:45 – 12:15 Hands-on Practice w/ PT; Begin Writing first draft of script
Lunch 12:15 – 1:00
1:00 – 2:30 ProTools II: Edits, import music, volume graph
Break
2:45 – ? Work time
Dinner
7:00 – 9:00 Evening Event
When we stopped work about 5:30 we had our audio loaded, a couple of minutes of polling sounds (no cicadas, the cicada sounds I’d found just sounded like noise), and an uninspired host intro – “With election season upon us, political polls have become more and more prevalent. They’re in the morning paper and the nightly news. What do they mean? Where do they come from? What do we do with them?”
It seemed as though divine intervention would be necessary for all 28 of us to end up with completed pieces in the next two days. Two groups were still out on recording expeditions, many still had audio to load, and others, like us, had no idea what their story was going to look like. Only one group seemed to have everything under control.
I was worried that we’d be the first group to leave the center with nothing to show for it though Brian was confident we’d come up with something. Going into our interview with no clear idea of what we wanted to end up with meant we had a little of this and a little of that but not a lot of anything. Not enough to do a story about our interviewee, about North Carolina political polling, or about political polling in general. We’d asked the wrong questions or hadn’t asked enough of the right ones.
Photos courtesy of Alix Blair
Next time: Lisa wakes at 3:17 a.m. with an idea
This is a documentary class and we are all trying to make documentaries. We all want to make something that will thank the people we’ve interviewed for their time. When we see our interviewees on Day 7 we want to feel like we’ve told some version of the truth.
What Brian and I have so far is a news spot. We have to figure out how to turn our tape into something that qualifies as a documentary. I go to sleep milling over our options and hoping for inspiration.
Documentary
Snapshot/portrait
More show, less tell
Story arc – beginning, middle, end
Real people are the crux of the story, not the ”experts”
Involves participation from the subject of the story (hopefully)
Subjective, doesn’t have expectation of objectivity
Holds attention, has an element of surprise
Research informs the story
Burrows into the subject
Point of view is OK, is expected
3-Dementional
At 3:17 a.m. I wake up with a vague idea for a script. Deciding my ideas will be forgotten by morning, I stumble out of bed locate a pencil and paper then crawl back under the covers to scribble down my thoughts.
———
When I arrive at CDS I corner Brian outside the auditorium and tell him about my early morning scribblings. My notes sketched out the similarities between designing a poll and making a documentary. I knew that a documentary about making a documentary was nothing novel and comparing political polling to documentary making might be a bit of a stretch but this new angle to the story would be more fun and more interesting than a news spot. Brian agreed that what was interesting was not so much what we had but what we didn’t have. Our story, like our topic (political polling), was about the questions as much as the answers.
———
The morning session was devoted to Host Intros.
Intros should:
create a scene for the listener to walk into
tell who is doing what and why the listener should care
give the listener something to think about, stir her curiosity
lead smoothly into the piece it’s introducing
be an opportunity for the host to make you look good and for you to return the favor
can be the most important part of the story, if the intro doesn’t grab the listeners’ attention there won’t be any listeners
(may introduce location, characters, numbers, statistics)
be short, sweet, and to the point
After being reminded of the importance of the not-so-lowly introduction each group read their intro aloud then listened to comments and suggestions from John and the other students. A few of the intros were elegantly written but most, like ours, seemed to have been thrown together at the last minute. Brian and I obviously didn’t listen to any of the above advice because we just added a final sentence to our intro and figured it wasn’t great but was good enough:
“With election season upon us, political polls have become more and more prevalent. They’re in the morning paper and the nightly news. What do they mean? Where do they come from? What do we do with them? Lisa Tharpe and Brian Crews set out to answer these questions but quickly found that, as in polling, the answers you get are based on the questions you ask.”
Even with an hour and a half devoted to intros we had to rush the final few groups to get everyone done before the morning break.
After the break I read aloud the notes I’d scribbled earlier that morning while Brian typed them into the computer, translating my thoughts into complete and coherent sentences. We now had a very rough draft of our script. Using that draft, we went through our log and inserted the appropriate actualities into the script. Our next step was to listen to the actualities and adjust the script so that it matched exactly what we had not what we thought we had. Listening to the actualities made clear the advantages of a word for word transcription. In quite a few cases, the quotes we thought we had and what we actually had were significantly different. Deft editing helped in some cases but in others we had to look for new actualities.
Working on our script.
Excluding lunch, dinner, and another ProTools lecture, we spent the rest of the day (until 9:00 p.m.) working on the script and cleaning up our actualities. It seemed crazy to be spending so much time on a two-page script and two minutes of tape. I wished I’d listened more carefully as we were conducting the interview and had asked professor Bacot to repeat himself when he elided words or left them out entirely. Many of his sentences made sense in context but when pulled out on their own fell flat.
On the plus side, we finally had something resembling an actual story and were no longer feeling oppressed by our lack of tape. In fact, the groups with fifteen minutes of “great audio” didn’t look so lucky any more. They were struggling with audio overload and could have told three different stories and still had tape to spare. As unsure as I was about the piece we were attempting to put together, it was comforting to be surrounded by a dozen other groups struggling with similar problems.
Photo courtesy of Bill Erwin
Day 6: Pacing, fades, magic, and Loco Pops
Lisa,
Thanks so much for your recounting. It feels so immediate, I’m a little on the edge of my seat, as though you were still in the midst of this. Great you’re taking the time to share your experience there.
Syd
Sydney, The end is near. I promise.
Yesterday morning, I was procrastinating by reading the SundayStyles section of the New York Times and came upon Jesse Thorne, America’s Radio Sweetheart, in the Vows section. It occurred to me that what I wanted to be when I started this adventure was him. Not the sweetheart part, or the young part, but the inviting interesting people into my (non existent) study and talking to them part. Little did I know I’d have an almost pathological inability to listen to my own (recorded) voice. Tangent aside, in today’s episode Brian and I will finish our project, I’ll narrate it, and I won’t die.
Our last day of instruction, began with a ProTools lecture. John went over fades and pacing and levels. These were not the showy skills of previous days but the quiet flourish that make all the difference. I was awed by cross fades but quickly forgot everything he said about levels and since it was our last day of class I didn’t bother to write anything down.
Shea with a pineapple.
Brian had tickets for the opening of “The Dark Night” so we were on a strict(ish) schedule. Immediately after class, we would record our narration. Since both our subject and Brian are men with southern accents and I am not we decided that I should narrate. I considered this taking one for the team since, as I’ve said before, I don’t like to listen to myself. We’d also decided to record our narration in my rental car because someone had told us we’d get better sound in the car than anywhere at CDS but with the outside temperature predicted to be in the ninetys the decision seemed a little circumsppect. Needless to say, I wasn’t real eager to start the narration. We read over the fourth draft of our script and made a few last minute changes then headed out to the car. (I had read somewhere that chewing an apple helps eliminate mouth noise so I brought one along).
The interior of the car was dismally hot so while Brian got his equipment in order I turned on the air conditioning. Closing ourselves into the soon-to-be sweltering car was an act of sheer devotion. I would follow John’s suggestion and read each track three times, write: 1 2 3 underneath each track, then circle the version we thought sounded best. It was so hot by the fourth track we had to start opening the doors after each reading. We were booth dripping with sweat, requiring me to wipe my face so that it didn’t drip onto the script as I read. Even though I’d read and reread the script many many times I keep stumbling in the same places so we decide to change the script rather than have me read the troublesome sentences over and over and over. Every few minutes I took a bite of my apple, which happily was sweet and juicy. It may or may not have kept my tongue from sticking to the roof of my mouth or making weird tisking sounds but it was a tasty distraction. We threw open the car doors as soon as I finished the last sentence and the thrill of finishing the narration and getting out of the car made me giddy. We were both feeling cocky and started talking about being the first group to finish and maybe even finish our piece before dinner (wishful thinking, of course).
The night before, Brian had found a Yo La Tengo song called Green Arrow that began with a chorus of cicadas that would be perfect to set our first scene. A dreamy, contemplative instrumental followed the cicadas and would be a nice end to our piece. With the narration completed and the cicada problem solved, we had almost everything we needed. The only thing missing was The Star Spangled Banner, which we wanted to use to introduce our second scene. While Brian loaded the narration into ProTools I searched YouTube for the perfect version of our national anthem. (I pulled out three for Brian to choose from – Boy Band, soulful a cappella, and a traditional instrumental. Brian showed more restraint than I might have and chose the instrumental.) We used the blissfully simple Audio Hijack to gather the music from YouTube then quickly loaded the anthem into our ProTools session. All this before lunch.
We spent the afternoon side by side trimming, fading and contemplating the duration of each transition. Then there was the problem of the lack of noise under my narration. The transition between Professor Bacot speaking above the hum of the air conditioner and my humless narration was jarring so we found a use for the oh-so-important room-tone. We laid a bed of air conditioner hum under my narration smoothing out the transition between the two voices. Once we had our rough mix together we sat John down to have a listen. It was awkward and exciting watching him listen to our work.
John listening to our piece.
John was encouraging and let us know we were getting close then gave us a list of suggestions some technical others structural. We set to work on some of the suggestions and ignored others. We then repeated the process – listen, critique, flurry of activity – with Alix and then Tennessee. The afternoon was mercifully broken up by a Locopop delivery. We’d been hearing about them all week and they did not disappoint. Locopops are frozen fruity goodness on a stick, a riff on the typical Mexican paletta but a bit more gourmet with slightly tweaked flavors like cardamom, mango-chili, and hibiscus. (They also have other more common flavors – strawberry, chocolate, vanilla…) The sweet, frozen goodness was a welcome reward for all our hard work.
Brian and his Locopop.
Brian and I took turns editing but the more we did the more we needed to do. Finally, around dinnertime we wrangled Shea over to walk us through the finishing touches. We’d heard jokes about the master fader and needed to learn how to use it and how to bounce our session. In addition to the master fader, Shea introduced us to some magical control panel where they (I just watched) fiddled with my voice so that I sounded better than I really do. Shea also pointed out a bundle of odds and ends that he thought needed our attention, which lead to another round of edits. Thankfully, Brian had people to see and places to go and so acted as the voice of reason otherwise I would have stayed until the early hours of the morning tweaking and adjusting. At 8:00 we saved our session for the last time, burned a cd, checked off a list of things that needed doing then took the yellow sticky with our names penned on it off our computer. At 8:07 we turned in our cd and wrote our names on the “Projects Completed” board.
So here’s what we turned in:
Host Intro:
With election season upon us, political polls have become more and more prevalent. They’re in the morning paper and the nightly news. What do they mean? Where do they come from? What do we do with them? Lisa Tharpe and Brian Crews set out to answer these questions but quickly found that, as in polling, the answers you get are based on the questions you ask.
Questions And Answers
Photos courtesy of Alix Blair
Day 7: CDS Invites the Community to Eat and Listen
My last day at CDS was sunny, cloudless and, mercifully, below 90. The two large tables on the center’s porch were piled with breakfast goodies and producers and their subjects sat under a white tent eating and reminiscing like old friends. I was disappointed and also a little relieved to find Professor Bacot absent from the milling and munching crowds but enjoyed being introduced to the other interviewees I’d heard about all week.
Staff, Instructors, and Graduates of The Center for Documentary Studies 2008 Summer Audio Institute (I’m the one in the large, white 70s glasses.)
After eating our fill we strolled down to the auditorium to listen to 14 documentaries (at least tangentally) about Democracy. Some groups had worked until the wee hours of the morning but none had been at the center all night, as had happened in past years, and every group had turned in a completed project. I was excited to listen to the ways each group had tackled the problems that, a few days earlier, had seemed insurmountable.
I can’t post all 14 pieces here but directions to find CDS at iTunes U can be found at the end of this post. Below are my two favorite pieces. I’m certain their producers would be happy to answer any questions you might have. So please do ask away.
Host Intro:
John McCain’s experience in war led to his later involvement in politics. Another Navy fighter pilot, Captain Ted Triebel, served for more than five years in Vietnam and spent six months in the same prisoner of war camp as McCain. Triebel now lives in Orange County, North Carolina. He describes to producers Ginger Moored and Kathleen O’Neil how his war experience changed his outlook.
Listen to:Life’s Not Fair
Produced by Ginger Moored and Kathleen O’Neil
I sat next to Mr. Triebel as he listened to this piece and watched his face go from “wait, this isn’t the story I wanted to tell” to “That wasn’t the story I thought I was telling but that’s the story I meant to tell”.
Host Intro:
Estelle Leighton is short. Really short. The 80-year-old decorates her apartment in what she calls “early garage sale,” sews her own curtains….and has the gumption to go nose to nose with George W. Bush. From bringing charges against the president to communing with strangers, Leighton has devoted her life to political action. Amanda Burr and Lisa Morehouse bring us her story.
Listen to: I’m Unusual
Produced by Lisa Morehouse and Amanda Burr
Lisa Morehouse, Estelle Leighton, and Amanda Burr
Lisa and Amanda had a whole lot of tape and went back and forth about the story they wanted to tell. At one point they printed their log, cut out all the lines they wanted to use, then spread the pile out on the stage and kept rearranging until they had something they thought would work. That got them started but the finished product was nothing like the story they had laid out on the stage.
To listen to the other 11 documentaries from this summer (and all the other CDS audio docs) follows these directions: Go to the iTunes Store. In the search window at the upper right corner, search for ‘center for documentary studies.’ Click on the CDS icon, then look for the Audio Institutes tab in the middle of the page. Scroll down to the "AI-1 2008" pieces. Listen/ download for free.
Photos courtesy of Amanda Burr
Next time: Final thoughts on CDS and The End of The Road
I managed to completely bungle the course title. The correct title is: CDS Summer Audio Institute, Hearing Is Believing 1: What Does Democracy Sound Like? Sorry about that.
I fixed it in your copy above. History is now re-written.
This is my stepmom, please, may I get an mp3, please of this interview?
I’ve known Estelle longer than I’ve known my real mom, and she’s been amazing to me. She’s made a difference in my life. I’m writing something about her. Thank you.