For COM333 textual description for February 13

Better organization saved my nerves and (I think) produced a better result

A story I interviewed for on Friday is going to be more complicated, and may serve better as a video piece. But the same afternoon presented the opportunity to report on Douglas Rushkoff’s visit to Vancouver and the story that goes with it.

I tried a different tactic for this  audio piece. On previous weeks I’ve suffered  over  those illusive word gobs that skitter away or break off like wild horses.This week I decided to attack my nemesis with order. Here’s what I did.

1. I listened to the entire recording, transcribing parts I thought I might want to use. I wrote down the timer where each clip was located in the recording.

2. I went back and reviewed my results. I actually transcribed verbatim the parts I wanted to use, so that I would feel very confident of the content of my clips and the choices I made.

3. I reviewed the results on paper, and I felt I made better decisions about which clips I should use.

4. I dumped what I thought were the best clips into a table as you see below, and then started writing my script, which ended up taking very little time.

5. Finally I started depositing the sound clips onto the tracks in Audacity, and it too, took only a few minutes.

6. The hardest part was cutting the piece down to two minutes, because I had  three minutes of material I wanted to use. But I learned that I could take out a repetitive phrase here and an interesting but non-essential tidbit there, and finally got it pared down.

I hope you like the result, and that I’ll see you at Rushkoff’s visit or out doing your part to share digital ethics within your sphere.

Here is the format I used for my  table: