Traveled down to London today for some trial work experience with Whistledown Productions. Whistledown are the biggest independent supplier of content to Radio 4, and they’ve made some great radio (including both the “Questions, Questions” and “Reunion” series).
Their building is compact but really pretty, sporting an awesome cast iron Victorianesque spiral staircase. They also have the largest custom-made tea mugs that I have ever seen at a production house, which serves as a neat corrective to anyone who says that radio production is a soft option.
More importantly, though, the staff there were all extremely pleasant and let me undertake some pretty useful work while I was there. For most of the morning and the early afternoon I got to run through the audio and the script for “The Dirty Dozens” with Kevin Dawson, to see what sort of changes might need to be made before the links were recorded and the material was selected for the final edit. “The Dirty Dozens” is a documentary about the transmission of a verbal sparring game played by African slaves onto the schoolyard and into the modern rap battle. The material they’ve assembled is fascinating. Benjamin Zephaniah is narrating the piece, too, and whatever you might think about his politics, his voice is genuine, informed and appropriate. I’m sure it’ll be a cracker once it’s finished, so I heartily recommend that you listen to it when it airs on 30th December at 11:30 am on BBC Radio 4.
In the afternoon I was given a practice editing task, my first time using SADiE 5 (and its accompanying wheelbox thingy). I had to unpick about 11 minutes of continuous material for a segment of an old “Questions, Questions” dealing with Spring-Heeled Jack. It took a while getting used to wheel + mouse interface and the way cuts and effects worked (i.e completely differently), but knowing how to use both Audacity and Audition still helped a lot. I like the way SADiE lets you choose from about 60 different ways of fading it or out (using different geometrical curves) and displays the ‘new’ levels as a darker colour with an outline, but leaves a paler imprint of the original behind, so you can easily compare how different methods work visually as well as aurally. I also liked the ’scrub’ feature. This turns your wheel into a miniature, highly sensitive, turntable which lets you find with pinpoint accuracy the start and end of certain words or sounds (or just have fun rewinding and slowing down people’s voices, whatever takes your fancy).
Anyway, with a little help and encouragement, by the end of the day I felt as though I’d got to grips with a lot of SADiE’s features (enough to assemble the small feature pretty competently, at least). Unfortunately, it makes my cheap USB mouse / Audacity set-up at home seem a little lacking by comparison.
On the plus side, I’ve been invited back for a full week at some point in the future! Huzzah.
