For this assignment, Adrienne and I teamed up and got a taste of creating a SoundSlide project. First, we had to choose a topic. Since we both know some of the members of the local band High Country, we decided to get a hold of the guys and do our project on their band. We recorded an interview with three of the five band members and gathered photos from live performances at the Cowboy Saloon in downtown Laramie.

My experience working with Adrienne has been great. There is NEVER a dull moment when the two of us work together. When things don’t go our way, our sense of humor helps to lighten the mood and improve the situation. I think it keeps us sane when we get a little frustrated. Throughout this project we have developed a few “inside jokes” that we will probably be quoting for quite some time.

Overall, my SoundSlide experience was great. I enjoyed working with Adrienne because we always manage to get our work done despite occasional set-backs and we have fun doing it. Also, it was really fun to sit down with the High Country guys and hear their stories. They are a fun group of guys and it was really hard not to laugh during some of their stories.

I learned a lot about using new programs and I feel that my skills in the other programs we previously learned in class are improving. The more I work with these techniques, the easier they get.

Like usual, we experienced a few minor technical difficulties. For some reason, we always run into some kind of snag with Audacity. Thanks to excellent note taking, we were able to re-edit the audio profile with little trouble. Luckily, we were able to figure out and fix the problems and then the project went fairly well. Other than that, it was just a little time consuming trying to figure out the timing and order of the photos. This wasn’t a problem, just a little more tedious.

Another problem we had that could have been avoided was background noise during our interview with the guys. Like I said, it was hard not to laugh during some of their stories and once in a while I couldn’t help but giggle. Then we had to edit our own laughter out of the recording. Another problem we faced was fidgeting. Every now and then during our audio recording there are clicking sounds, caused by one of the band members playing with a pen while he talked. We weren’t able to edit out all of these clicks. We also had a cell phone start ringing during the interview that we were able to edit out.

For the future, I will remind my interviewees to turn off their cell phones during the recorded interview. I will also try to perform interviews in a location free of distractions, like pens and other things people may be tempted to subconsciously play with.

Overall, I think our final project turned out great and I am very satisfied with it. Our SoundSlide can be viewed by following this link: http://uwyojournalism.com/?p=608 or http://klandreville.com/morency_wilhelm/soundslider.swf?size=1&format=xml&embed_width=465&embed_height=400.