Category Archives: Room With a View

Room With a View – Assignment #5.2

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Room With a View was a studio that presented me with the opportunity to develop two core skills that are crucial to my long-term career aspirations. The first of these skills is understanding the difference between ‘something that happens’ and a story. The studio tasked us with finding stories and developing pitches for them. To serve as stories, our works featured unique angles, voices, and insight into specific tales—even ones that shine a light on the broader world around us.

The second skill that I developed through this workshop is how to tell stories. I was presented with the opportunity to develop my audio making practices in order to tell a competent and engaging story through audio alone. Through this process, I developed an even stronger appreciation of sound as uniquely valuable means of communicating ideas.

I felt that two other groups in particular from my media studio exemplified its teachings. The first of these groups developed a project called Frogspotting Melbourne. True to its name, their story involved going out to record a frog census. 

This group took something that was happening—i.e. the frog census—and turned it into a story. Through this process, I thought that they did a great job of capturing audio’s unique ability to present the listener with a strong feeling of co-presence.
Co-presence is a concept developed by Scannel that was first introduced to us through an assigned reading titled Key Concepts in Radio Studies. Chignell wrote that “the key to the success of a lot of contemporary radio is the sense communicated by the presenter or DJ that somehow (s)he and the listener exist in the same place at the same time,” (Chignell, 2009).

Per Chignell’s explanation of radio’s success, I thought that Frogspotting Melbourne did a great job of making the audience feel like they too were walking around a swamp hunting for tiny amphibians. In line with the teachings of this workshop, this proved that audio has a unique ability that is not quite present in other mediums. Were I to watch a video of people frog spotting, for instance, I do not think I would have felt the same sense that things were happening directly to me.

Another project that serves as a quintessential example of one of the workshop’s teachings was Building Equality: Women in the Works. This project also encapsulated radio’s ability to create co-presence. Whereas I felt Frogspotting Melbourne did so through visual description, this project did so through the use of active sound.

Active sound is a concept that I was introduced to through the prescribed text Active Sound: How to Find It, Record It and Use It. Active sounds are those which are recorded on-site, capturing noises as they happen. According to MacAdam (2015), active sounds are what “turns a script into a story.” Through capturing on-site sounds, this project did a great job of making us understand the reality of women in construction. In doing so, it may have even helped address audience biases as readers of this story may have instead imagined men in construction roles.

Branching out to another studio, I decided to look at projects in the Power of the Cut workshop—as it was not a studio I preferenced. Here, I focused on two works in particular: Anna Charquero’s Edit Series and Joshua De Sa’s Edit Series. Both portfolios feature three edited projects: a narrative, a documentary, and a commercial.

Both documentaries displayed a similar teaching from the Room With a View workshop: finding the right talent to speak to and using interviewing techniques. Here, a text that we were prescribed called The Art Of The Pre-Interview  feels particularly relevant. I felt that Anna’s work in particular utilized the idea of finding a subject who is the “vocal equivalent of jazz hands”—aka. a great speaker (Herships, 2016)

The broader edited portfolios as a whole made me think about how much of the story that I told for my audio feature was decided during the editing process. I had hours of audio at my disposal and used only a fraction of it on my final work. This aligns with what I believe Power of the Cut to have been about, as the studio description states that its purpose is to investigate “what lies hidden in the cut between clips?”

As such, I think that studio might have been a good opportunity for me to learn how much power an editor actually has over a narrative. While I focused on the perspective of going out in the world to tell stories for the purpose of my Room With a View studio, both the editing process for my assignments and consuming these Power of the Cut works made me reflect on how much of the storytelling process actually took place once I got home and started editing.

Academic works cited:

Chignell, H. (2009). Broadcast talk. SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446269060

Herships, S. (2016) The Art Of The Pre-Interview, Transom. Available at: https://transom.org/2016/art-pre-interview/.

MacAdam, A. (2015) Active Sound: How to Find It, Record It and Use It, NPR. Available at: https://training.npr.org/2015/09/29/active-sound-how-to-find-it-record-it-and-use-it/.

Radio feature – Individual Reflection

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The role in my group was to conduct the interviews and narration, as well as work on assembling the piece and mastering it in Audition—with my group mates’ help on the editing side of things. Collaboratively, I think we worked together really well. We were upfront about our shortcomings during our initial group meetings and played to each of our strengths.

As we had to change the direction of our story several times, we did not have the opportunity to use the feedback we received during our pitch session. If anything, the feedback in our pitch session further freed us to move on to other stories, as we were not all on the same page about creating a piece about saving The Tote.

I am incredibly pleased with how much of the rally we managed to capture. We had to start our story over so many times, and there are literally over an hour of interviews that we did not use—even after settling on focusing our piece around the rental crisis. For instance, we interviewed an RMIT economics expert, Angel Zhang, but that interview did not survive the cutting floor. We also had a lengthy interview with the CIO of Launch Housing, which went well but was scrapped due to many of the people we spoke to at the rally later telling us about their disdain for the organization. As such, we instead opted to use interviews with grassroots organizations like Friends of Public Housing. With all that in mind, I am very pleased how cohesively we managed to tell a story that had so many moving parts due to both our group’s struggles and division between the people most affected by this crisis.

I am also pleased with how we managed to vary the texture of our piece through the use of a variety of sounds and voices, which is something we were mindful of after reading Mike Ladd’s article The Art of the Radio Feature. In addition, I am pleased with how many active sounds we managed to include—such as chants and spontaneous interviews with tenants as they arrived at the protest—by getting to the event early and speaking with its organizers, as per Alison MacAdam’s article Active Sound: How to Find It, Record It and Use It.

Listening back to the final mix, there are some parts where the audio gets noisy and/or the levels seem to change despite being heavily compressed. For whatever reason, we found it near impossible to fix these in Audition. I think this is due to the way in which the interviews were recorded at the rally in such a fast-moving context, and the use of candid interviews such as when Margaret spontaneously joined our conversation. We were not experienced enough in sound production to get the audio at the level we wanted it to be. 

The early in-class practical exercises definitely made me feel more comfortable going up to strangers at the rally. Simon and Kyla had done great work scheduling the interview with the leader of the Victorian Greens through mass-calling and emailing her office. Originally, this was going to be the only interview we had on the day. However, the practical exercises made me feel courageous enough to record an additional 6~ interviews—two of which we used in our final piece. Those exercises also helped me navigate around difficult interview subjects.

At the time of the feedback sessions, our original story had fallen through and we had not even decided on our final story. As such, we did not get any direct feedback. However, the feedback given to other groups—especially in regards to the use of atmos and music—did inform our final project. We were very mindful of trying not to ‘overpower’ any of the interviews, as this was a common piece of feedback handed out to other groups.

I hope our listeners gained insight into the rental crisis and the ways in which the term ‘social housing’ is being used to distract us from ongoing threats to public housing. I also hope, despite it being political parties like the Greens who are championing this issue, that the audience will walk away from this story feeling like the rental and housing crisis is something that we all need to care about.

I do intend to continue working on this piece as I want to include it in my portfolio. I think I will actually keep the current structure but import the audio again from scratch, as I cannot figure out why there are weird errors in the audio that I believe might be coming from Audition. I will also watch tutorials to better understand how to EQ out harsh sibilance and have better mastery of dynamic compression. 

 

Sources:

ABC Radio National (2022) The art of the radio feature, ABC Radio National. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/the-history-listen/the-art-of-the-radio-feature/13829982. 

MacAdam, A. (2015) Active Sound: How to Find It, Record It and Use It, NPR. Available at: https://training.npr.org/2015/09/29/active-sound-how-to-find-it-record-it-and-use-it/.

 

RWAV ‘on-air’ show – Reflection

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In the process of translating our demo to our final broadcast, we were mindful of the feedback that our coordinator Heather gave us. In particular, she noted some issues that we made when introducing pre-recorded segments—such as accidentally introducing the same segment twice and forgetting to signpost our interviews. Fortunately, in our actual live-to-air broadcast, we avoided these mistakes.

Another piece of feedback we received was to better plan the exit of our show and introduce Breakfasters. To make sure that we did this in our actual broadcast, we wrote out the exact runtime of each song and segment on our runsheet and kept an eye on the clock during the entire show. This allowed us to end the show at around the exact time that we needed to.

In terms of collaboration, I thought that Simon and I worked together well on this assignment. We built our on-air rapport between the demo and final broadcast, which helped things go smoothly. I would have preferred, however, to have been in a larger group as having just two people limited us in terms of the amount of creative input that we had to work with during the creation of our project.

A massive improvement can be heard in the audio quality of our live piece in comparison to the demo. I actually attribute this change to having read The Podcaster’s Audio Handbook: A Technical Guide for Creative People, one of the set readings for Room With a View. Green (2021)’s work helped teach me how to position a microphone without capturing breath noises, which was actually something I had ever learned during any of my time at SYN. 

In addition, our project was informed by Beaman (2011)’s work. He wrote about navigating past hurdles in interviews, and his point about making sure that you are talking to the right person was especially helpful. Thanks to this reading, we were very deliberate when it came to selecting our three interview subjects. We actually bounced around ideas with Adam of Triple R about who would be the best people to talk to for each of our stories.

Overall, I am incredibly happy with how the show turned out. I believe that my prior experience with SYN and having taken Sounds Like a Story aided my technical and on-air abilities, which let us navigate past any on-air hiccups that we experienced. The only thing I would change, if given the opportunity, is to improve the audio quality on our interview with Michael of Maurice Blackburn (about Uber). The lav mic we used was faulty, and we had no way to correct that when we were at his home recording the segment.

I hope that this piece succeeded in communicating radio’s ability to persevere throughout time, largely thanks to how sound is able to create an almost unmatched sense of intimacy with listeners. I was very mindful of creating a strong sense of co-presence while working on the show, which I hope was successfully received by the audience.

Sources:

Beaman, Jim. Interviewing for Radio, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=684041.

Green, CM 2021, The Podcaster’s Audio Handbook: A Technical Guide for Creative People, 1st 2021. edn, Apress, Berkeley, CA.