One of the biggest surprises I encountered as I crafted Mr. Secrets was discovering the challenges of digital audio work. Before arriving at DMAC, I had been most concerned about the visual work the film would demand—scanning letters and photographs; learning the programs that would allow me to arrange them and connect them to my musical resources and whatever script I would voice over; figuring out how to frame and highlight portions of the letters themselves.
I had an old cassette tape of a family party that would provide me with my father’s actual accordion playing—and that introduced me to the first benefits of DMAC collaboration: Dr. Cindy Selfe’s generosity in digitizing this tape for me. The next benefit was far more complicated: DMAC’s ongoing instruction about and assisted practice with the digital audio editing program “Audacity.” The program itself is excellent and powerful—a remarkable openly available resource. But it turned out that audio work is far less intuitive than visual (at least this was so for me), and that it demands far more precision. Working with audio resources—both spoken and musical—that were visually reframed as exactingly precise sound waves proved fascinating and unexpectedly difficult.
The range of audio elements that I would need to handle to produce the film that I hoped to create turned out to be more varied than I had anticipated: carving out the exact portions of music I wished to match with specific images; managing that music’s volume when it was the only audio resource being featured; matching that music to both image and voiceover when all three were necessary; learning how to fade music in and out, so that its presence was never too abrupt or interruptive; even learning how to record the voiceover—which looked like the simplest of tasks—so as to eliminate the ambient noises to which digital recording is so sensitive.
This complex audio work taught me not just about digital audio creation and editing, but very deeply about the necessity of ongoing collaboration as the bedrock of multi-media projects. It brought me into the most constant contact with DMAC’s audio experts, and also—in posing a large and largely unexpected challenge—taught me much about the pace of and patience demanded by learning a much less intuitive technology. Those enduring lessons will, I know, prove invaluable as I resume multi-media production in an upcoming course I’ve been asked to offer on digital storytelling.