Editing an Interview

The biggest problem that I ran into this week in editing my audio interview was trying to decide what should stay and what should go. Selecting which topics and issues discussed during the interview should be included in the five minute piece was hard enough but selecting which precise sound clips should go on was excruciating. Once I had decided on what key points I wanted to convey to the audience, I had to go through and decide which parts sounded the best. This, was another problem. The quality of the sound was great (I am truly pleased with my audio recorder and I feel as though I figured out how to properly record sound) but the actual interview was flat! My subject, Bill Tole, was perhaps the worst person to interview for a multimedia piece. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with having his picture taken, and the presence of the camera and audio recorder seemed to make him nervous. He answered with succinct, innocuous answers and was hesitant to elaborate on any point. It took quite a bit of coaxing to get him to expand on almost every response. There are some points during the final clip in which my voice can be heard asking questions due to the fact that there were many answers he gave which make almost no sense unless the audience is given the question. I was never able to get him into a free-flowing conversation, and that resulted in a very difficult interview to present to a listening audience. So between deciding what should stay, and what I could actually use proved to be challenging. The final "cut" for this assignment ended up being a little over a minute. I found that as the interview became more concise it played far better. It was no longer a chore to listen to. Working with MovieMaker proved to be so much more simple than I had thought going in. I found it to be a very user-friendly program that lends itself well to those who don't have extensive use with this kind of software. I am still getting my feet wet with most of these multi-media components but I felt at ease using this. Inserting the pictures into the slide show was fast, and straight-forward. I had no issues placing with that aspect, or in dealing with actually editing the sound. The visit from Tom Snyder was so great due to the fact that we actually learned how to use the software before we dealt with it. Learning from Tom about MovieMaker was informative and getting first-hand knowledge while editing his interview was truly invaluable. It was by far the best visit we have had so far during the course; Tom was engaging, funny, and he truly taught us how to work with sound. He did not just talk about his experiences with sound but he showed us what to use, and how to use it. I felt much more confident about using audio after his visit.