The creation of “Bowing Out” proved to be a turbulent journey, and was a massive learning curve for myself as a journalist. Undergoing the long production phase in the midst of a global pandemic presented many challenges, and proved difficult for a host of different reasons. In this post, I will be providing an insight into some of the different elements of this production phase, and showing how I was able to piece together this documentary whilst navigating the many obstacles presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The original blueprint for Bowing Out, would see it be produced as a television documentary - as opposed to a radio piece. I had made initial plans for several scenes, including gaining access to a boxing gym, and also filming an interview by the beach to allow the conversation to have an emotional edge. I was very set on making this all happen, recognising that it would be difficult due to the restrictions in place, but still determined to safely find a way around them. However this was blown out of the water by the arrival of a full November lockdown, which would ensure that I would never be able to get my filming wrapped up, and have the post-production phase finished before the deadline. This was arguably one of the most stressful parts of the journey for me, as I had run into a huge obstacle which there seemed to be no way around. Due to this I decided that I had to make the transition over to radio, which would obviously present its own unique challenges, but ultimately would provide a platform for me to be able to complete a full documentary on.
Now that I was creating a radio documentary, I had to stop considering visuals, and instead had to start planning on how I could establish the themes of a boxing documentary solely through creative use of sound. I planned for this by looking back at some of my past research on sound, and also conducting a host of my own. I re-familiarised myself with elements of creative sound, even looking back at how methods such as Foley are used to create the appropriate sound by using alternative objects. I planned to set an incredibly tense scene at the beginning of the documentary through the combination of a variety of boxing SFX, and my own voiceover. The idea was to have the suspense from the active boxing at the start, so that when that comes to an end the listeners will question what is next. The theme of my entire project is centred around the career of a boxer ending, so I desperately needed to signify that during this section. I began to try and source my own SFX for this incredibly important introduction, and started by recording myself skipping on my outside decking. I also went to the extent of using the voice memos on my phone to record sound from my last session in my own boxing gym before lockdown. However these carried their own issues, with the wind hindering the quality of the skipping audio, whilst copyrighted music in the background would prevent me from using the sound gained from my session in the boxing gym. I ended up building the introduction with royalty free sounds featuring things like crowd noise, sparring, and a final bell. This was layered with more free-to-use sounds of heavy breathing and heartbeat, which I combined with my personal voiceover to create an intense introduction that will instantly immerse the listener.
The bulk of my documentary would come in the form of interviews, which again would be understandably much more difficult to secure in the midst of the pandemic. Thankfully, the process was made less stressful through the use of Zoom calls to conduct all three of my interviews, with the online platform allowing me to safely speak to people without putting me at any COVID-related risk. It also allowed me to connect with Jacquie, and add an overseas interview into the mix. I can confidently say that Zoom was an absolute saving grace for the project on the whole. The only small downside was the impact that conducting my interviews online would have on the overall quality of some of the final audio. Certain segments of the interviews became glitchy and laggy, due to the internet dropping during moments in the conversations. This was especially apparent in my interview with Sarah, where the internet began to drop heavily midway through our chat. Luckily I was able to work around this, discarding unusable parts of audio that had been harmed by having to conduct my interviews online, and being creative with how I was cutting my audio together. I lost certain filler words from valuable sections of audio, and had to try and replace them with similar words from other parts of the chat as a result of this, but was able to make it sound seamless enough through careful editing on audition.
Finding music to accompany these interviews was something that I also found to be a challenge. I had already decided to leave the introduction alone as I needed it to be impactful, but I knew that I needed background music for both the interviews, and my own presenter pieces. Leaving the interviews without music seemed pointless and would make the overall documentary a bit flat, so I set out to find some music that would contain a relaxed sound. I settled on four tracks, one for each interview, and then one that would play whenever a presenter link is heard. I kept the sound levels low, but just loud enough for it to fill a gap and be noticed, which helped to make the piece feel more complete. I also did things such as cut the music early towards the end of Jacquie's interview in order to let her final sentence cut through more and be more impactful, whilst also letting the music tail off on its own to end the documentary. It was through my use and distribution of small elements such as the music, that allowed me to achieve a professional sounding end-product.
Finally, I think it would make sense to touch on how the pandemic impacted the experience for me. University students like myself from all over have been having to alter their various productive processes due to the pandemic, and having to produce such a large project on my own whilst adhering to the guidelines in place was a new experience personally. For the majority of my time producing “Bowing Out”, I have been alone either in my University accommodation or at home, with much less support from University because of what has been going on. This also meant that I had to purchase Adobe Audition myself as opposed to using it for free on University computers, and had to figure things out for myself instead of receiving advice from a supervisor. The limited access to the studio rooms at university also impacted the process, as I had one day of access to them in which I had to record all of my links. The difficult seven minute time restraint amongst other things meant that some had to be re-recorded, but I had to resort to sitting under a duvet cover with my IPhone to do this.
Working from home.
Despite all of these issues, I have fortunately been able to emerge from it with a final piece that I can certainly be proud of. I am very excited to release Bowing Out in the next couple of days, with further notification coming on our Twitter page when this happens.