Montages

I love editing audio, it can tell a story without pictures, which is perhaps why I found myself working in radio at one point. If there’s one thing I love about the end of a year, it’s those reviews that the news broadcasters put together that makes you say “oh yeah, that happened, I remember that”. From a media studies point of view I always pay attention to the way they are edited and the songs that are chosen to play in the background. I’ve been doing these audio montages since 2005 to put on my end of year mix CD’s as a way of recalling what happened in that year.

This is how the weather played out in the media as Live Earth was pretty much drowned out by Rihanna’s almost iconic chart topper Umbrella when the rain just would not stop in the English Summer. Play the review of the year montage with the flash player below.

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A debate was going on in our media as to if Climate Change was really our fault, on one side Al Gore and the IPCC surely an unstoppable movement now culminating in Live Earth, on the otherside Channel 4 with the Great Global Warming Swindle, balancing out the science. In the middle, you, me and the rest of us dealing with the weather. Maybe the debate should now be about how we adapt?

These take ages to produce, hours of sound “megabytes” end up on the cutting floor as I look for the killer soundbites. It takes a while also to figure out where there is space in a track to overlay and mix in the news clippings and the fade transistions also require some amount of playing it again to get the timings right on the edit in Audacity. The results though speak for themselves and really capture how mainstream media (MSM) covered that topic in that year.

Posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009