I had so much fun with this project!

My friend, Ryan, who was gracious enough to let me interview him, talked about
Scream’s impact on meta-humor in movies.  We had just watched the film two days prior to the interview, so it worked out perfectly.  Ryan lives in New Hampshire, so I had him record his audio through Garageband as we talked on Skype.  After our conversation, he exported his file to an mp3 and emailed it to me.  I recorded my vocals the same way for Ryan’s interview, but when it came for my personal interview, I figured out that it would be easier to just record the audio directly through Audition.  For my own interview, I discussed Halloween’s (1978) impact on horror movie cliche’s and the respect it deserves for that.  These two topics go hand-in-hand, so it was rather easy to edit them together and tell a coherent narrative.

I decided to make a beat for the background ambient sound, because I didn’t want to mess with finding non-copyrighted music or recording the outdoors.  Instead, I found a sample through Apple Loops (which supplies hundreds of royalty-free samples) that sounded very similar to the Halloween (1978) theme.  Following that, I added a simple bass-line, a snare, and an eerie pad.  At this point, the beat sounded too squeaky clean, so I added distortion to the bass and pad to give it that gritty, creepy feel.  Lastly, I soaked the main melody in reverb to create ambience.  This beat is very simple, but it fits the Halloween vibe well.

The last thing I did before arranging the final project was editing the audio clips for a second time.  I lightly edited the raw audio before this draft, but it wasn’t enough.  There were too many spaces and verbal fillers, so I cut them out to give a better flow to the clips.

Then it was time to edit all of the audio together.  I decided to not include my question to Ryan, because he restates it well so the listener knows what he was asked (Scream’s impact on meta-humor in film).  The project is more about the interviewee’s answer than the interviewer’s question, in my eyes.  I recorded a small intro into Audition to introduce the topic and help the listener follow along easier.  That was placed at the very beginning, followed by the faded in beat.  After four bars of the beat playing, Ryan’s vocals enter.  The editing process was relatively simple, but took a lot of trial and error.  I had dilemmas of what phrases could be split in two or combined.  I experimented with how the order in which our vocals came in and out, as well.  I initially had my voice coming in before Ryan’s, but I knew that I wanted my final point to end the project.  To make that happen, I had to begin the project with Ryan because I had more usable audio from him, so that freed up more time and space for my vocals to fit in.  And that’s pretty much it!  I just faded the music out at the end and that was that!  This project has helped me discover my love for audio editing, and I look forward to doing a lot more of it in the future.