The first thing I did when editing all of my audio footage for Joystick Revolution was cut down all three interviews into their streamlined but “extended” versions. This involved tidying up ‘ums’ and cleaning up stuttering. I did this for all three, and condensed the content of their interviews down into clips that ran for between four and six minutes.
After this, I recorded my narration in the recording studios. It took a few drafts of this recording for me to be satisfied with the speed and the pacing of what I’d said, using the previous iterations of narration to develop a basic structure and figure out what the overall runtime was. From that, I timed the rate at which I spoke in order to bring the length of the piece down to what I needed it to be. Here’s what that looked like after I’d finished:
Next came music and sound mixing; I used a library of royalty-free music from Kevin MacLeod, and tried to find tracks that fit the general theme of video games while also sounding right for what was being conveyed in each portion of the documentary. For the beginning, I wanted something with a dramatic build-up that wasn’t too uplifting, as that would clash with the serious nature of my opening. For the end, I wanted something inspiring, but still not necessarily uplifting, to match the tone of there having been progress, but still more work to be done. Here’s what it looked like after putting in the music:
Finally, after reviewing the finished piece a few times and getting some peers to listen to it for any audio imperfections, I mixed it all down into a single track, here:
Joystick Revolution 