Deeper into the process

Post production (delirious editing sesh)

In the post-production we did a crazy editing tag team style of editing. It was on a school night, that we had to finish editing, and we stretched that day out until its last limit. 

Essentially how we distributed out our editing work was Manu, would work on putting together the opening montage. 

 Then, Nicole would organize the order of interviews in a rough cut and add graphics, as she has plenty of experience with post-production with her extensive involvement in TV Production. 

She would then send me parts of the video as she cut them together and I would add b-roll to it. I would also work on our title slide, which I was able to animate through Canva, a popular online design platform usually used for flyers or slidedecks, by exporting it to Premiere. 

Canva! the wonderful design tool I made the title slide animation in.

Through this strange parallel editing, we worked quicker, and could each focus on the individual tasks that we were best fit to. This facilitated us to achieve a final product I am more than proud of but guess what... 

Just a few more roadblocks (sound edition)

It could not have been another one of these posts without just a few more roadblocks. One of our big worries during our interview with one of the poets was that after we finished our interview (and did not have any more time to repeat because they had to leave back for college) we realized that our mic pack had ran out of battery mid way through the interview. Luckily we did have a Plan B. Unlickily, it was unoptimal. Thankfully we also captured audio on the camera, and we intended to use that audio for the documentary without much problem. However, it posed stronger problems than I previously thought as the audio was staticky, had a lot of background audio, and the dialogue was unclear. 

But we learn, adapt, and overcome, so it was over to solutions mode. From my portfolio project last year, in which I ran into similar audio problems, I learned a little bit about working with bad audio. First I tried what had worked for me in the past, which is Adobe's onboard audio tools. But, this time, the audio problem was too big of a feat even for those tools. I fiddled around with the enhance, the EQ, the presets, all of it, but none of it seemed to make the audio much better. 

Adobe Premiere Pro's onboard audio tools

At this point I turned to the good old internet and began to frantically search for a way to fix my audio. What I ended up finding was the Enhance Speech tool from Adobe Podcast. After importing the affected audio clips, at first the tool was not perfect. It made some parts robotic and added some weird pitches to others. So I put the file back in Premiere, tweaked it a little, put it back in Enhanced Speech, adjusted the levels of enhancement and FINALLY. Some glimmer of hope. The audio was sounding... pretty decent. Which to be honest, in this moment after fiddling around with audio for a few hours in a delirious sleep-deprived state, felt as if I had just won the Super Bowl or gotten into Harvard.

"Enhance Speech", Adobe Podcast's newest free online tool for easy audio correction.