Post #15 - Ready to go!

After a few stressful months and very long, tiring weeks I was proud and happy to finally say that my MA Major Project is complete and ready for submission. Yay!

I was hesitant on the format I wanted to submit everything but I finally decided I was going to recycle the website I created for my MA application and add a new tab called ‘MAJOR PROJECT’, so I could post everything in the same place. Not only would it be easier to access but it would also look neat and professional.

Therefore, under the “MAJOR PROJECT” tab I am submitting my portfolio, my reflective journal, the three first episodes of No More Loaned Language - The Podcast series, a personal manifesto and an instagram account where I focus on language and fashion.

At this point, I am very happy with the final result and incredibly proud of what I have been able to achieve thanks to this MA Fashion Innovation and Realisation.

This is not the end but just the beginning of an exciting journey.

Post #14 - Let's get loud!

I was told that Audacity, a programme widely used to edit podcasts, was pretty easy to use and that I will get familiar with it as soon as I start using it.

Well, it was not exactly like that.

It took me around 3 hours to understand the basic tools and to be able to find them in the menu. After that, I started playing around with the content I had.

At first I thought I didn’t want to edit much in order to keep the authenticity and the essence of each conversation but this was however, impossible. While listening to them I realised there was a lot of background noise, repetitions due to nervousness and signs of doubt when speaking.

Of course the editing process took me longer than I expected. I would say that on average it took me around 4 hours to edit each episode. Not only did I have to edit the conversations but I also included music - because is there anything better than JLo’s ‘Let’s Get Loud’ track to raise awareness about the importance of language? I don’t think so -, an opening, an intro and a closing part which also took me time to edit, cut, add effects on and make it all work together. The whole editing time I would say it was around 20 hours.

I also thought of submitting three full episodes and one extra that included the highlights of the three. However, once I listened to them I disregarded this idea straight away. I felt the episodes were very well organised and orchestrated so that I didn't want to cut them just for the sake of having another episode. At the end of the day, quality is always better than quantity. Moreover, since this is a series I would continue after submission, I felt it was going to be weird to have an episode focusing on highlights of an unfinished series.

This conclusion actually helped me realise that I needed to find ways to take the podcast series to a broader audience and obviously social media was the first channel that came to mind. Therefore, I will create an Instagram account where I will advertise the podcast series and I believe the main way of doing this will be by posting the highlights of each episode as posts.

Post #13 - Is this working alright?

Once I had these three interviews done, I turned the MP4 files into MP3 in order to get rid of the image and only keep the audio to edit afterwards. I listened back to the recordings and I felt proud and happy with the outcome. Although I didn’t want to edit them much because the essence and the authenticity that somehow were attached to them would get lost on the way, I had to work on them a bit in order to delete some background noise, long silences or overlapping content.

Moreover, I wanted to add an intro to the series. I started researching some music I could use for a few seconds at the beginning of the episodes and I recorded myself introducing the podcast, the guests and closing every episode. I had to repeat the content in front of the camera a few times because it wasn't fluent nor natural.

Once I had this content recorded, I repeated the MP4 into the MP3 process so I would have all the content ready to be edited. Finally, I was ready to get myself familiar with the editing programme.