In todays workshop we had to show our rough cut to Jon who works in the industry and is very well versed in audio pieces. It was a nerve racking situation because I felt our group was really under prepared but mostly to be completely honest I don’t think the entire group is committed to the main idea of the project. Pitching an idea that you don’t agree with was a useful thing to learn and being able to purely focus on what we had been doing in the project.
Jons main criticisms were about smoother transition. He said that we should specifically think in ways of allowing the audience to think about what we’ve said and transition into the next idea. He did although say we made sense and that he enjoyed the content of it (I know he is very polite).
Another criticism he had was that during the vox pop we had put an old cigarette commercial with a lot of lyrics and talking behind it so it would be best to keep the tracks instrumental especially when there is a lot happening in the background since they were interviews done in the field.
He gave us tips on how to best makes changes to the background music when someone is speaking and to make sure we were increasing and decreasing the volume of the music as people would speak and as a transition happened.
He understood we still didn’t know where exactly the project was going because he was able to notice some of our own internal tensions within our group as to how best to talk about the subject. He said we needed to have longer discussions as to how best conclude the story.
This was super useful in going forward with our assessment because it made us really focus more on the editing and less in the ideas. Even though we still have a bit of a way to go in terms of concluding what we want to say it was a good task to do because it is always super useful to have someone look at your work with a pair of fresh eyes…. or ears in this case.