JD Photography

My preproduction work felt great. I had a script and a plan to record between three to five minutes add some nat sounds and I will be golden. That was the plan.

I recorded great nat sound at the beginning of the marathon. One the race started and I was engulfed by 23,000 people I forgot about recording. By the time 26.2 miles was ran, my body was in no condition to think about recording.

I planned on a recovery run a couple days later and sure as anything, I forgot to record the run.

How does one go about making a production when most of the recording opportunities are now in the past? The answer, sound libraries.

I still recorded my narration to my MacBook Pro into Adobe Audition. I found music that felt like it belonged with the journey the listener is going through. I recorded my alarm going off just like on those early morning long distance run days.

I needed footsteps. I missed all of my opportunities to record my own and so I went to freesound.org to find the running steps.

When I began editing I realized my narration needed a little extra… something. Filippo Gaetani writes in his article 7 Secrets for Getting Pro-Sounding Vocals on Home Recordings published on Sonicbids, “A few effects plugins you may want to equip yourself with include: a good parametric EQ to cut unwanted frequencies and enhance others, a couple of compressors, a de-esser, two or three types of delays (short, medium and long, to be used in different parts of the song), one or two high quality reverbs (short and long – again, to be used creatively throughout the song).”

A little tweak made my voice sound more full and took away some of the room tone.

The rest of the editing process was creating layers with sound FX, music, and nat sound. Trying to make the audio level blend instead of overpower and trying the create a balanced sound.

Finally, I wanted to leave the listener motivated and empowered. There was very little I had to do when I have the Sargent Major of the Marine Corps talking about getting motivated and staying motivated.

This is definitely an area I haven’t spent lot of time working in, but I’m excited to try more audio mixing and production.