Adobe Audition Project Final

Our station produces 13.5 hours of television every weekday! It’s a crazy amount of news for a local station to produce, but our amazing team does it. It takes a big staff and a lot of resources to accomplish that feat.

Every year around the holidays, our bosses graciously cancel some of our newscasts so that many of us can spend time with our families. With those newscasts gone for a couple of days, we still need to fill the time, so we create pre-recorded specials that cover various topics: investigators stories, cold cases, charity work, features, etc.

I’m in charge of producing the FOX 12 Weather Special. It’s a look back at the biggest weather stories of the year for the Pacific Northwest. I write, produce and host the special with our station’s chief meteorologist. We cover anything from floods to tornadoes to big wind storms to snow. 

For this project, I wanted to create an audio piece to put out to our weather podcast audience that would promote this year’s special. I did an interview with Mark Nelsen, who is hosting with me. Also, with permission from the station, I used clips from various news stories of interviews my colleagues and I did during the year, reporter live shots, and anchor reads. I used relatively quick cuts and interspersed them throughout to give it a Radiolab feel.

This year we had some very interesting weather stories in the area. After a lackluster start to the 2018-2019 winter, February brought several rounds of snow to the Portland metro. Snow here is a big deal, because the city doesn’t have enough equipment to be everywhere at once. Schools close, people take the day off of work, and there are always accidents and cars that end up in the ditch. The big joke is that a half inch of snow can lock the city down… it’s so true! I always wanted to include a snow story about an Amtrak train that got stuck in the Cascade foothills for over a day and a half with about 180 people on board. Three tornadoes also touched down in the Portland area this year, which is rare to have happen in such populated areas.

I recorded the audio of my track and the interview using a TASCAM DR-40 with an external microphone. For the news clips, I imported .mov files to Audition. In the end, I had seven tracks with my various audio sources. After I edited the piece, I mixed it down and normalized the audio, then used a multiband compressor to give it more of a rich, filled out sound.

In my draft piece, there were some edits that weren’t as clean as they could be, so I adjusted those. I also had some nat sound of a chainsaw that my classmates thought was out of place. I replaced that with reaction to a tornado. My classmates also suggested the use of some music. I ended up using an old timey weatherman song that my good friend Scott Burns put together for my podcast years ago. I’m using it again with his permission.

I love telling stories with audio and video. Both are such powerful mediums if done right. I am happy with how this piece turned out and will post it to my podcast page as we get closer to the holidays. I hope you enjoy it too!