From the beginning of January to the end of February, I was working with James Acraman, Ellouise Marney and Jack Cocklin to produce a children’s Audio Book for Ollie Samuel and Penguin Books. Coincidentally we were also assigned to work together to produce an Interactive Music Video for Kelli and Natalie. We began with researching existing Children’s Audio book such as the works of Roald Dahl. We chose The Gruffalo for our Audio Book so we had to go through the book to get an idea of the sound effects we would need. We all provided the cast with me as the Narrator and the Snake, Ellouise as the Mouse, James as the Owl and the Fox and Jack as the Gruffalo.          

We did not always keep each other well informed of how we were progressing with the sound effects and who had them and who did not. This contributed to us repeatedly losing the sound effects after we had transferred them on to our hard drives. Switching between different computers to do our editing also contributed to this particular problem and this briefly led to frustration and tension among the group members apart from James.     

Recording the voiceovers went very well after a few rehearsals, we recorded the voiceovers in F200 as it was not in use at the time and we needed somewhere quiet to do the recording. We were a team member short at the time as Ellouise was absent. We went down to the woods at the back of Oaklands College to record the bulk of our sound effects, particular those that one would expect to hear in the forest such as the fox creeping and the Owl hooting.    

Recording the sound effects was particularly difficult due to the presence of a lot of wind and background noise and we had to be really loud for the sound to be heard on the Zoom 4N Recorder. We also kept losing the sound effects after we had transferred them on to our hard drives every time we started editing on a different computer and had to try to retrieve them or just transfer them to each other’s hard drives again and/or import them again and this meant we were not able to properly finish editing until the day our projects were due to be handed in. We also found that we did not have enough sound affects for all the animals in the story, the most obvious ones being the mouse and the snake, I was reduced to increasing the speed of the fox creeping sound effect just to provide a suitable sound effect for the mouse and simply using the sweeping wind sound effect from the copyright free forest soundtrack and my own attempts as hissing for the snake.     

I gained a better understanding of how the Zoom 4N Recorder works and how it can be used handheld or mounted on a stand and that sound effects can come from just anything such as banging on a tree stump or a bench, this provided the sound of the Gruffalo’s footsteps or flicking through a stack of paper as long as they are close enough to and loud enough for the recorder to play an audible sound. The flicking paper effect was meant to provide the sound of the Owl flying away while James merely provided his own hooting. The fox creeping we simulated by stepping on a mound of leaves.  

Next time I would try not to spend too long editing the dialogue or searching for royalty free and copyright free music as these have been the main reasons why I have forced to this evaluation at the last minute. I will also try to start my evaluation a bit earlier even if my actual project still is not finished.  

We used a Zoom 4N Recorder and a shotgun mic to record our sound effects and our voiceovers, for the latter task, we had to mount the shotgun mic on a stand. We mostly used Adobe Premier Pro on the computers in F308 and sometimes the ones in F303 to do our editing. We did not always remember to switch the recorder on or to the record function and we had to produce our sound effects at very close range for us to hear the results clearly when we had finished.

I edited my Audio Book using Adobe Premier Pro but it took all day to get the editing due to deciding which pieces of dialogue I was satisfied with and trying to find royalty free and copyright free music and not to mention trying to include enough sound effects. Eventually I managed to get my editing all finished and my audio book exported to Sound Cloud and my website with help from Ollie and Emily-Rose.

I need to try to not focus too much on one particular aspect of whatever it is I am working on in future as this takes up too much of my time that I could be spending working on other things such as Evaluations. I also need to learn to start doing written work such as my evaluation a bit earlier. I will also try to spend more time and more effort working on sound effects until I have truly produced a satisfactory number of required sound effects. I will try to communicate better with my team betters and make sure we have got our raw audio or footage imported on to all our hard drives as soon as possible and make sure for certain that everything I have imported on to and edited on my hard drive is saved properly every time I finish working on a particular computer so I do not have to start all over again when I start working on a different computer.