I realized that the missing element was music. When my feelers for original music came up empty, I went to the Jazz collection and found the perfect piece of music: Poor James from the CD Tractor Parts: Further Adventures in Strang by the Canadian band, Zubot and Dawson. Sadly, the band is no more. It was Ken Rockburn who introduced me to the band when he played their fantastic song, Tractor Parts, on All in a Day back in 1998.
Once I picked the music and started placing it, things started feeling right with the show. I had wondered if I should include a second piece of music. That can be too much, though, and I decided to limit myself to the one song. I also decided that it would be used specifically to score the excerpts of the reading. There has to be logic to the use of the music, it can’t be random.
The editing and refining continued, though most of the effort was in cleaning up edits, removing some bumping of the microphone and, in two cases, cleaning up mistakes made by the speakers. Thankfully, the way each speaker corrected themselves facilitated a clean edit and you’d never know. Purists would argue to leave the mistakes in. However, in this particular show, it made more sense to clean up the mistakes. They errors were minor enough and the responses to the mistakes more intrusive than the mistakes themselves.
OUTSIDE EARS
I did a thorough refinement of the first four minutes of the show and listened to it for both audio and story flow. It still didn’t feel right. When I played it for Andrea, she pointed out a few things that didn’t work for her. In particular, my voice over, the readings and interviews had different energy and emotional levels. The readings and the interviewee spoke in more bursty and extreme intonations and my voice over was mellow and reflective.
MOOD AND ENERGY FLOW
I re-recorded my narration to be more punchy and energetic and played back a rough mix. That was much better. The individual clips made more sense as a unit so I went back to smooth out the hand-offs between clips and mix the music. I also boosted the level of the ambient sound during my introduction so that there was more energy in the opening.
REFINING THE MIX
The process of mixing the elements for a smooth flow seems to me like staining a quality piece of furniture; it takes several passes, patience and a lot of care. I worked on that for a while and realized that many of the voices on the show seemed a bit sharp in the mix. I’m not sure if that’s the mic or the qualities of the voices. I used my equalizer to add some warmth and remove some of the clarity from recordings. I should note that I hadn’t adjusted any of the frequencies prior to that. EQ’ing is the last thing I do. I only do it to make sure that each element has its own room to breath. If you find that two pieces of mixed audio are fighting with each other spend less time with the volume faders and more time giving each piece of audio its own space in the audio spectrum.
FINAL PRODUCT
I finished the audio production work in the early evening and created a mix I was happy with. All it took was patience, listening, feel and an iterative approach to finding the pieces that best told the story. In the end, I went from seventy-eight minutes of recorded audio of the event to a nine-minutes and fifty-four seconds of reading excerpts and interview clips included in the show. My entire voice-over of introduction and narration was one-minute and seventeen seconds. The program is thirteen-minutes and sixteen seconds long and has been published under the name A Bear in War on the Just One More Book website.
I’m an audio guy and I often profess that audio podcasts are the best option for mass distribution and ease of consumption. However, even I can’t ignore the popularity of video. More to the point, no matter how hard we audio folk try to make it obvious that site visitors can press play on an audio player, many people just don’t get it. Even if it is far more intrusive (that is, you are glued to your video screen to consume a video), video on the web is far more obvious to use.
So, we’ve tried an experiment. We published the “A Bear in War” documentary as a normal audio podcast of Just One More Book and to help people understand that there’s multimedia content available on the site, I created a video/slideshow version of the documentary (using the same audio), uploaded it to Viddler and embedded it within the post for A Bear in War. Given more time and energy, I would have done more to make the video more compelling for the average viewer by using transitions, pans and zooms — like Ken Burns. I threw the video together very quickly.
Interest in the video is encouraging. After about two hours, the unpromoted video was watched thirty-six times.
FINAL TALLY
Not including travel time and the blogging I’ve done to document my workflow, but including the research and recording times and the production of the video, it took me about sixteen hours to create the A Bear in War documentary. It’s not unusual for a documentary to take a significant amount of time to produce which is why I don’t do many of them. I do very little, if any, editing in most of my hobby production work which means that the average ten minute podcast probably takes about thirty minutes to record, produce and upload.
I’ll create a summary of my workflow post highlights later today.
I’d mentioned in an earlier post in this series that I don’t storyboard or plan my episodes. That’s mostly true. In some lucky cases the story line and the way to present it has been obvious to me (listen to Connecting with Val Willis: The magic of ‘My Horse, My Passion’). Other times, a deadline helps motivate me to weave together an interesting story told by many voices (listen to Before Green Gables and 100 Years of Anne Shirley for which I recorded four hours of audio at a book launch and then produced a twenty-one minute documentary in my hotel room that night in another four hours).
THE THEME
As I listened more closely to the recordings I made and the way I had labelled them, it became clear to me that the main story is the blend of fantasy and reality that magics-to-life love, conflict and the passage of time.
Having made that decision, I was able to eliminate a lot of the audio as unrelated to the main theme, and then start moving pieces in place.
In order to keep things interesting, I took some liberties in the sequencing of the story and intermixed excerpts from the book reading with reflections on the real family and the process of creating the book. I also managed to keep my voice out of the program as much as possible — a bonus. It’s particularly effective in a documentary when the facilitator’s role can be implied or completely overlooked. The characters and the witnesses should be the stars of the show.
Putting everything together is like solving a dynamic puzzle; any combination can work though some combinations work better than others. And, to keep things particularly interesting, all of the pieces are interdependent; moving one piece can affect others or even the entire flow of the program.
So, I spent about four hours moving pieces about on my audio canvas. Selecting which pieces to use wasn’t the problem. Those feels obvious to me.
LIKE WRITING A SONG
As I think about this whole process — and, believe me, this is the first time I have really thought about what I do and how I do it — I realize that this is a lot like songwriting. Some people write songs from titles, others write music from lyrics or melodies, and still others will back-fill lyrics from music. In fact, some people can write in all three ways.
Sometimes, a project I’m working on will happen completely on its own just by me picking the right clip with which to kick off the show. That’s right, sometimes the right 5-20 second opening clip will be like a creative spark and the rest will flow and fall into place. The “A Bear in War” project began with a draft recording of a framing narrative then putting some of the storytelling elements in place. As I shuffled and considered them, I realized that the backstory needed to be pushed through quickly to get right to the meat of the story. So, I decided to open the show with an excerpt of the reading which, using a dialog between Teddy and Aileen, gives away the war setting of the book.
After the theme music, I use a short narrative to create a scene in the mind of the listener…
when am I speaking
why is this moment significant
where are we
what are we going to experience
who is going to walk us through this journey
For reasons I can’t quite figure out, I’m not able to make an introduction of the program and myself as host work. That’s still not a priority right now. I have bigger questions on my mind like will music make a difference? If so, what type? I listened to some music during some errands earlier today and wasn’t able to find anything that feels right. I’ve put a couple of feelers out to some musicians I know to see if they have time and interest in putting together two minutes of original music for me. I want the music to convey a feeling of being connected across distance by a stuffed toy. I want that on an emotional level, though. I don’t want chimes and plinky crap.
BLOCKED OUT
Where the book takes a lot of time to set up the warmth of the family, I don’t have the time to do that. What I mean by that is I don’t think I can hold the listener’s interest by getting into too much detail. Besides, I want to introduce the book, not give it away in its entirety. So, I move from my narration to another excerpt in the book and then I introduce the grand-daughter of the soldier — the woman that found Teddy. From there I move to some short clips with the authors. I let them explain that the book is about a family during wartime, not the war.
This is the first of all my book-related coverage in which I’ve used so many excerpts from the book. I like them becomes they move the story along. In fact, the five excerpts I use pretty much tell the main story. But, that’s not my shining moment in this program. I have taken it upon myself to demonstrate the importance of this book by including the voice of a child that shares what his favourite moment in the book is (a tender moment in which the soldier pins his medals of bravery to Teddy) and I include two questions (one deep and one light) asked by children during the Q&A along with the answers given by the authors. Parents should know that there is no reason to shelter their children from the reality of life.
In its current form, the program is about twelve-and-a-half minutes long.
My next tasks are to review my narrative and make a decision on music. After that I’ll start cleaning up the edits and mix.
I realized that the missing element was music. When my feelers for original music came up empty, I went to the Jazz collection and found the perfect piece of music: Poor James from the CD Tractor Parts: Further Adventures in Strang by the Canadian band, 
I’d mentioned in an earlier post in this series that I don’t storyboard or plan my episodes. That’s mostly true. In some lucky cases the story line and the way to present it has been obvious to me (listen to 
