I must admit, on the surface this assignment seemed pretty straight forward and I thought I would have it complete in no time, with a modicum of effort. I was quickly proven wrong! While fun and creatively challenging, this assignment venturing into the world of audio further broadened my perspective on all it takes to produce even a short clip of audio in a professional manner.

The initial challenge I faced was having to develop a concept to work from. I spent a large chunk of time chasing down a serious public service announcement hunch, and when I walked away from that idea, true inspiration struck. When I freed my mind from that one idea, even with the intent of reworking it later, I opened myself up to the creative flow, and that is my first lesson learned: don’t hesitate to entertain every idea you have, even if it is but for a moment.

This leads to the next obstacle: write a radio script. the experience I had in high school on the speech and debate team set me up nicely to overcome this barrier. The ability to think on the spot given a general concept is certainly an invaluable one that I am grateful to have worked at in my life. However, actually generating a great script for your talent to read from is not a skill I have adequately learned yet. this took several revisions and help from my talent to hammer out. Now that I am aware of the writing class tailored to this particular field, I am eager to expand my skillset all the more.

Much to my surprise, the heftiest challenge of all wasn’t using the technology to put my audio together, (although the experience of doing so is invaluable), it was directing my talent. Coming from a Speech and Debate and high school theater background, I have grown accustomed to feedback and constructive criticism when it comes to performance. My talent and friends on the other hand do not share in this background, and so being delicate while still getting the take I needed did prove frustrating. I had to give up some of my creative control to balance the vibe in the recording space so that level heads would prevail. In the end, my vision wasn’t met to a “T”, but I did learn to work with talent other than myself and how to utilize diplomacy effectively. I am glad that I decided to record my audio last, because that gave me lead way to fit my voice work in with that of my talent and to alter my script accordingly.

All things said, this was a wonderful assignment and I look forward to meeting and (hopefully) overcoming the trials and tribulations of the other media based assignments in the course.

https://soundcloud.com/rhias-2/ima-sp15-sutton-rhiannon-p4-audio