Editing

The editing process of this piece did not come without it's setbacks; being the designated sound editor of this project, it was my job to find my way around the Pro Tools software in order to edit our piece together. Having never used any type of specific editing software, I found this to be quite difficult, especially seeing as my past experiences have had little to do with the technical aspects of film-making, so I saw this as a huge learning curve for myself.
Despite being overwhelmed by all the different options and controls, the layout of the software seemed pretty straightforward and importing the audio files proved to be easy enough. The difficulties came when navigating the software, and learning about how to do each different edit that I wanted to apply to our piece. The main thing I needed to put across in our piece, was that the atmospheric and ambient sounds (the platform, train, people ect.) were supposed to fade out and the dialogue (the person reading the text) was to slowly become louder and more distinguishable. This meant learning how to use the volume levels in such a way as to put across this concept; between myself and my partner, we have so far managed to get the hang of playing with the volume levels in order to achieve the desired sound, now that we have done this, the piece is beginning to come together.

Now that we have both of these important ambient tracks down, it was then a matter of layering all of the other tracks that we had to accompany the reading of the text; Connor had recorded various sounds that relate to the passage he is reading e.g the sound of bacon cooking, the clinking of cutlery, and other general noises. I had to incorporate these into the audio in a way so that the listener would know which part of the piece that they were supposed to relate to. So, we had these gradually fade in a long with the speech; the sounds are supposed to add a sense of space to the listener in regards to what is being read from the page.
With my limited understanding of the software, I didn't want to over-complicate the piece with various different and complicated edits. I don't think it was necessary anyway, as the piece if more about getting the timings of the sounds right, rather than manipulating what is being heard. I think the edit we have so far still needs some work, but we are well on our way with what we are trying to achieve.