In finishing off the editing for Rex Danger I attempt to play around with improving the audio quality. To do so I just jumped on YouTube and found a video that seemed to cover some of the issues I thought were present in the footage. Although the video covered a couple of different ways of attempting to fix audio recordings I wasn’t sure which process was going to be the best for my situation. So I mucked around with both normalising the max peaks and normalising all peaks. I found after a while I was able to normalise all peaks around about -9 dB to get an appropriate level for the audio. The only problem was then that the poor signal to noise ratio became more obvious and more of the background noise became noticeable. Another issue I found when normalising the audio was that regardless of if I normalised each clip independently or with other clips the difference in quality was highlighted. I’m not sure whether there is another function or process that allows me to ensure that audio levels remain constant. Obviously, there would be a function or process that enables you to achieve this but I’m yet to find it. I think that a worthwhile exercise will be to spend more time researching audio editing in Premiere and to watch more tutorials through both Linda and YouTube.

In regards to the final product of Rex Danger I’m pleased that I have managed to edit something coherent together. It has also provided a creative stimulus to explore both Michael’s on screen persona and the platform of the absurdist interview. I doubt this will be the last time Rex Danger makes an onscreen appearance and hopefully in the future he’ll be present in something shot and constructed more professionally.

In terms of the aesthetics I gave up on covering the jump cuts with B-roll mainly because what I captured didn’t fit continuity wise but also due to it’s crippling awkwardness. I think this was born by my naivety and the fact that I forgot to tell Michael to keep the cigarette in the same hand etc. If shooting again I would love to have a secondary camera to give me the ability to not only shoot from multiple angles but also so I could capture hand movements and other facets of B-roll during the interview.

Eventually I decided to export what I had edited and to refer to it as my first attempt at using off board audio and then Premiere to edit it.