As part of the media production skills module I was required to create a vox pop based on the topic of ‘student life’. A vox pop means ‘voice of the population’ and although the audience for mine would be mainly students, it is important to ensure that there is a range of varied responses. Based on this we asked many students around campus to ensure that the responses were diverse.
We were working in pairs to record the audio vox pop and had a three-hour timetabled slot to record both of our footage. As our time was limited we had to be productive but we took it in turns interviewing people to ensure that we both had enough footage. Bull (2016 p.137) suggests that when you are conducting interviews you need to be aware of sounds that can become distracting to the listener. We did face some difficulty with wind interfering with the audio as we were outside and we did not book out a fluffy cover for the mic. This lead to the audio was not being as of high quality as it should’ve been. This is something that I will consider if I do an audio vox pop task again. we did try and record in areas where this would not affect the audio as much however this was difficult as we were outside and it was a windy day.
We filled out a risk assessment when renting out the equipment which involved hazards such as tripping, slipping or weather issues. Precautions were taken to ensure that it was completely safe when recording and there were no issues regarding this.
We asked each participant to fill out a consent form to ensure that we had their full permission to include their answers in the final project. This consent form also had their contact information on so that I could ensure that I had all the information I needed. I did not need to contact anyone, however if I did need more clarification or content I could easily get in contact.
From producing this audio vox pop I learned that patience is important when artefacts such as this are being recorded. A lot of people did not want to participate when I asked them however this is part of the process so I had to be patient and keep asking people to ensure that I had enough footage.
Ensuring that you have enough footage when you are approaching the editing stage is also important. I had ten different contributors recorded and at the time I felt like this was a more than sufficient amount. However, when I began editing I quickly realised that it would have been a lot easier if I had more as some of the footage that I had recorded was not as suitable as I thought. I decided to use music within the background of my vox pop to make it sound smoother and to cover up the issue that I had with the wind. The music that I used was from freemusicarchive.org which prevents any copyright issues as this is royalty free music.
Bibliography
Media College (2018) Vox Pops [Internet] Available from https://www.mediacollege.com/video/interviews/voxpops.html[Accessed 2nd May 2018]
Bull, A. (2016) Multimedia Journalism – A Practical Guide 2nded. Abingdon, Routledge.