Recording + Editing

After our initial recording sessions we continued to record on a regular basis, this took several sessions to do a good job, but we found the time useful and rewarding. In our group we all picked certain jobs for recording, me and Liam became main News Readers while Ruhul took charge of vox-pops and editing. As well as this I took a key interest in the recording as I wanted to learn the new skill and be as involved in the final piece as I possibly could. The Editing system on Audacity was simple yet effective and involved cutting and moving sound-bites as we worked to make the piece flow as well as possible.

As a key news reader I felt I needed to take inspiration from professional news readers in the same way we initially took inspiration from professional radio shows. The most experienced and well practised one I could think of was Sir Trevor McDonald, so I researched him:

‘He was promoted in 1992 as the sole presenter of News at Ten, where he became one of the best known faces on British television screens. A year later in 1993, he was awarded an OBE in the Queen's honours list. McDonald stayed with ITN when News at Ten was axed in 1999, moving to present the new ITV Evening News. News at Ten was briefly re-launched in 2001, to which McDonald returned to presenting. He presented the ITV News at 10.30 following News at Ten's second axing. Since 1999, he has also hosted ITV's flagship current affairs program ‘Tonight with Trevor McDonald.’
I noticed he always sat up straight when delivering the news and spoke slowly and clearly. These are techniques that inspired me during my recording; I spoke softly yet clearly into the microphone to get the best possible sound and made sure there was no 'dead-air' time.

We overcame illness and time-table problems to meet up regularly to record our show and practised a lot in our own free time. Once we were perfectly happy we were practised enough and ready to perform we recorded a section. Many of the sections were recorded more than once and drastically changed to get the best results in the end.

Editing consisted of cutting and moving sound bites on Audacity to make our radio piece flow and improve the listening experience. This was relatively easy on Audacity as it is a basic program, but this also made it hard to do more complex editing- such as creating our disjointed effect for the Haiti story. During the editing process we had to import in our jingle and backing music, and create variations in volume- for example- making it slightly louder between headlines to indicate the next one was coming up.

I enjoyed editing as I got to be part of making what we’d recorded a final radio segment. It was extremely interesting to learn how it all fit together and created a piece of work I’m very proud of.