The Battle of the "Ummmm".

For my first multimedia project, we were assigned to find an unsung hero on campus and create an audio presentation on what they do to make the campus run. Val, Nicki and I decided to do an employee from Breaking New Grounds, which serves much of campus with delicious coffee to help them complete their work and classes. We took out an audio recorder and went to the Durham location last week and interviewed two employees, as well as some B roll. When we went in to edit the clips on Sunday, we were confronted with the reality that I hadn't saved the clips properly, which meant none of our sound clips existed anymore. Discouraged, we rented out another audio recorder and went down to BNG again to record a second set of B roll and sounds. This time was easier since we knew exactly what we wanted for sounds and what questions we needed answered. When we were done, we hurried to the lab to start editing. The first issue that we came across was the amount of background noise in many of the talking clips. When we tried to edit it out through the noise removal tool in Audacity, we made the girl voice sound almost robotic. The second, and really more pressing issue, that we came across was the amount of "um's" and "like's" she spoke in all of her sentences. It was quite outrageous and really very daunting for all three of us. The question that arises with these um's is whether to take them out of her dialogue, and possibly risk losing some of her pronunciation, or keep them in, and possibly have the um's really affect the flow and sound of the piece. We decided to edit out the um's, and we did lost some of her pronunciation, especially at the end of sentences, I am pleased because her interview came out well. We ended up picking a really good song for the background music. We finished last night, after editing almost constantly yesterday and I'm really excited to hear what Sandy and the rest of the class thinks. I think this is the first time in a long time that I've completed something for a journalism class that I've actually been proud of. Hopefully this will set the tone for the rest of the class. I'll see if I can upload, somehow...