Archive for November, 2009

Sharp-Leadenhall Audio Doc

November 22nd, 2009

Having inherited this project from another group I volunteered our group to work on this partly because I didn’t think our Lexington Market interview was very good and partly because despite the rather large amount of footage we had for this, the section of the interview where Colette and June talked about what had happened to their neighborhood where they were forced to move out, really caught my attention, because I had never heard of that before. So I based the audio documentary around that.

The hardest part of editing this was going through the 44 minutes of footage to find the few minutes of interview that I felt was really powerful and told a story. I also wished they had talked more about the history of Sharp-Leadenhall and what happened to them than about parking and the business of running the church which was what most of the interview was. But I still think what of the interview that did end up in the doc was really good, and I used narration to fill in the gaps.

As far as production, my favorite part of the whole documentary is the intro. Which actually came together by accident. I found the effect that I used to give their voices a more “tape recorder” kind of sound when I was trying to put EQ on and accidentally clicked something else and it sounded really cool. And I found the music while searching for blues jazz on freeplaymusic.com, and I wish I had more of that song but the entire piece of music was only 43 seconds long, so that intro is actually the entire song. That sort of mellow, simplistic, blue jazz is surprisingly hard to find.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the way the doc came out and I’d like to go back some time and get to do a more in depth interview about the neighborhood itself.

Listen here:

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