Idea and Inspiration
I decided to create an audio story that gives the visual image of a busy home on a Sunday night with family around. This project relates to my topic because the message I am trying to convey is how to have a happy and healthy way to enjoy meals, and what better way to do it than with family around. I believe having people around the dinner table is the centerpiece to making meal times more enjoyable.
Design Process
I took inspiration from personal values and reflected it into my project. In my household, we make it a point to sit down together at the end of the day and talk about our day while eating a home cooked meal whether that be some rice and spam, or an entire entree to feed a family of four. There was not a whole lot of research that I did to come up with this creation, as I can already see the beauty behind these authentic family moments. My goal is to bring that into light, as show the whole what our message is all about. On top of the narration, it was nice to have a bit of background noise with some soft ambient music to offset the background noise to feel full and busy, the kind of vibe I am going for. Initially, it started with me finding an old video that I had saved on my phone. I knew the point of this video was to record the ambient noises in my kitchen on a random Sunday night. I thought it was perfect for this audio story so I converted it into a .m4a file. I then started playing around with layers. This is where I introduced my narration, as well as adding one more layer of ambient noise. The edits that I made for this assignment was making the beginning a bit more clear, re-recording the narration to be louder and more clear, and making small refinements to pacing.
Technical Detail
It was easy to collect the elements for my project. All I needed was my phone to record material, but most of the material is original work that I used for my project. Using Adobe Audition, I uploaded all of my audio files into the new file. Once I had all the audio files I needed and uploaded, I began by finding the best parts of the first layer of ambient noise. Once I trimmed out all of the harsh noises and the parts that I didn’t like, I started to go through the audio file with my narration. For that one, I took out all of the unnecessary pauses and changed the pacing of the audio to better align with the ambient noise. Lastly, I applied the same technique for the third layer/second ambient noise layer and applied it over the entire audio story to help mesh all of the noises together more smoothy.
Sources and Materials
The sources and materials I used for this project were mostly material that I have recorded on my own. The only piece of material that is not mine is the second layer of ambient noise that I added to my story. This is the link to the video I used.