Wow! I can’t believe it’s the end of the semester already. For my final project, I chose to do an audiobook of The Veldt by Ray Bradbury, something we read way back in week 1. This project took a while to make but I really like how it turned out.

When I was at home, I used my dad’s Blue Snowball microphone/setup and recorded me reading the short story on Audacity. Initially, before any editing, I had about 50 minutes of audio.

Then, I took that file and imported it onto my computer/Audacity. On Audacity, I listened to the file and trimmed it down. Here is me editing part of it (the original video is about 25-30 minutes long, but it’s at 20x speed). This took a lot of trial and error (as well as googling) because I had never used Audacity before.

After trimming my video down, I re-read the short story and highlighted everything that I wanted to add a sound effect for on a PDF of the story. Then I went to YouTube and found corresponding sound effects that I liked. After that, I converted all the videos to MP3 files.

Then, I added the audio files one by one. When doing this, I had to trim down the audio files, usually lower the volume, and edit them any other way I saw fit. I did this one by one, mixing the tracks as I went. Here is a short video of what that looked like (this is only part of the audio, not all of it).

After all that, my audio was finally done! I added a title page and posted it on YouTube. It was a lot of work to make but it was also super fun. I picked audio recording because I’m obsessed with podcasts, so I wanted to get a feel of what it was like for them to produce and edit their audio. After this project, I am so impressed people can put out podcasts every week because it’s definitely not easy!