Arina Dara

ScratchThat is an entirely student-run magazine that showcases the works of writers, visual artists, editors and journalists. Alongside this, they also run a podcast named Blatherskite that releases one radio play each semester with weekly episodes spanning over 5-10 weeks. I was lucky enough to be a part of this project over the last semester of 2022, releasing 7 episodes.

Though I didn’t get to voice act in the episodes, I decided to not let this worry me and focus on my other task: Audio Editing.

I offered to do this role as I had some previous experience with music editing and I was taking Music Production classes at the time as well. This helped me broaden my editing skills (and patience) as I spent around 8 hours a week editing each episode. The first couple took longer but as I learnt, I got faster and found more joy in piecing the story together audibly.

• Formatting the written script into one cohesive style.
  • As we had multiple writers on each episode, the script layouts tended to need a little cleaning up.
• Writing in / Fixing up any sound effects, vocal effects or audio manipulation that had to be added in later by the Production Team.
  • I had to try and visually place myself in the scenes, considering any sounds that objects and people in the space would make.
• Listening to all the audio that was recorded for the episode.
  • I would listen through the over hour-long recording, making sure that all the lines in the script were recorded, labelling the voice clips as I went along and discarding anything that was not in the script (recording booth banter)
• Piecing the episode together.
  • I would pick out the best takes of each section and edit them together. This meant, making sure the pauses were the correct length, the audio was clean, only the best parts of each take were edited together and most dramatically appealing, and, of course, that there was no weird voice sounds made by the actors that they would dislike hearing.
• Listening to the episodes from start to finish and uploading them to get finalised by the production team!