Everyone has probably had the same experience. You visit a cool interactive website or watch a video on YouTube and as interesting as the project or storyline may be the audio quality leaves much to be desired. In fact when you listen to the audio it is so bad that it sends your brain into overdrive. Neurones fire in every direction as you slowly start to experience what can only be described as complete mental shutdown. After you finally reach the point of meltdown you quickly need to force what is left of your fried braincells to hunt for the mute button, which never seems to be in an obvious place. The audio quality completely ruined your experience and you will probably not want to share the project with anyone. You really don’t want this scenario to ever happen.

It may not seem that important but, believe it or not, good quality audio is the most important aspect, bar none, to any online project. Whether you’re making a video, recording a podcast, or even creating an interactive multimedia experience it is vitally important that you spend a significant amount of your production time making sure that your sound is perfect.

Why Is Audio So Important?

As humans much of our everyday life and the responses we make to our surrounding environment are measured or detected through our hearing. Our ability to hear is vital in even the simplest of activities like crossing the street.

When we cross the street, not only do we look in both directions, but we are constantly listening for approaching vehicles. We can tell, without even turning our heads, that a threat is immanent. Our bodies are fine-tuned to pick up on auditory signals and relay them back to our brain alerting us to what is happening in our environment. Even distance is something which our auditory senses can relay back to us without having to look. There has also been suggestions that hybrid and electric cars are in fact dangerous to pedestrians because they are too quiet for people to hear. Some experts have said that they should replicate the sounds made by other vehicles so that people, especially the blind and young children, can hear them coming. And if you needed more proof there has even been research which suggests that our skin plays a role in delivering sound to our brain. Humans are therefore wired for good sound.

Now the previous examples might be a very simple and possibly even crude example of what I’m talking about but take 5 minutes right now to think about everything you do in your day that relies on having good audio. If you then apply the same thinking to your project you will quickly realise that having poor quality audio can quickly ruin your audiences experience of your project.

Think of it like standing on a really busy street corner with trucks rolling past while you’re trying to carry on an in depth conversation with one of your friends. You can carry on the conversation but you will probably miss some really important information and have to get your friend to repeat themselves, it just makes the experience horrible.

We need to have good quality sound so that we can focus on what we are doing and it’s the same when we view or listen to a project. The absence of good audio can cause your audience to become distracted because their brains have to focus on trying to concentrate on sifting through the audio before they can focus on your content. Any experience where the audience has to do this is simply painful.

By focusing your efforts on creating good quality audio you can make sure that your viewers are not distracted and that they feel drawn into your story. The quality of your visual content is not really that important. It is easy to skip over bad visuals if the audio is great but great visuals with poor audio will not work.

Audio is the MOST important aspect of your project. Period.

What Makes Audio Sound Good?

Generally when people talk about audio quality they tend to instantly think of the technical aspects of the sound. These technical aspects can include everything from how loud the sound actually is, to what device you use to record it with, to whether it crackle like a radio going through a tunnel. But good quality sound is much more then just the technical aspects, it’s about the entire experience.

While all of the technicalities are vitally important to the success of your project (for instance you need to know how to record and produce crystal clear sound), they are not the only important things. You also need to think about how the audio can affect the flow of your story. Audio for projects needs to take your audience on a journey. They need to feel as if everything is happening in the same room as themselves, as if they could shut their eyes and still be driven by the powerful audio story through their mind. If you do it right then you can use your audio to affect your audiences emotions. Your overall audio track can be happy or sad, peaceful or angry, slow or urgent. It can take your audience anywhere you want to take them.

To create this experience you need to start thinking carefully about the overall audio structure by asking yourself some questions. These questions include:  What is your talent saying and what emotion are they conveying? Do you need to explain some of the story with a voiceover? How can you use silence effectively to draw out emotion? Where is it appropriate to use music or background tracks and can you use this music to propel the story? What sort of music suits the story you are trying to tell? How can you use your sound to cue different scenes? Does your audio match up with the visuals? What emotions do you want to convey throughout your project?… and most importantly…. Do you have a continuous flow of suitable audio which pulls your audience through your story creating an immersive experience?

If you start to think carefully about making your audio the best part of your project then you can really begin to make incredibly powerful experiences for your audience. So what are you waiting for??… Go make some great audio!

[Photo credits, [177], weglet, carolyn.will]

Pursuing excellence in your project can be a very exciting and thrilling ride. You can easily get into a zone where your efforts are focused entirely on the outcome of your project. While this might be what you love it becomes very easy to lose your perspective of everything else that is happening in the world. Suddenly your project might start to collapse from simple oversights which could have been avoided from the planning stages. One of those forgotten aspects is usually managing your money.

Now I will tell you up front that you MUST and I repeat MUST know how to manage your finances effectively from the planning stages so that you don’t run out of money or overspend when your project is nearing completion. While money is something we don’t like to think of when we are working on a project, without it there wouldn’t even be a project.

So to help you with managing your money here are some tips to make sure your project is financially secure from the start.

Create A Budget Before You Begin

Budgeting can be one of the most laborious processes in project planning but it is the most vital. Open up your favourite spreadsheet program and start listing all the different items you might require for your project and the costs associated with them. This includes the cost of any equipment or props you purchase, travelling costs, production costs, personnel costs, anything you can think of. Make sure you list everything you will need! One of the worst things is to come to the end of the project and overspend because you forgot some vital items in the planning stages.

If you are working solo on the project don’t neglect to include your own time as a cost in the project. Estimate the amount of hours you will spend on the project and calculate what you would like to earn per hour. Doing this will help you decide if your project is worth the time and effort you plan to put into it. Budgeting will also help you decide if you can afford the project you want or whether you need to scale it back.

Track Your Spending

It almost goes without saying that you need to make sure you keep up to date with what you have spent throughout the life of your project. Make sure you keep all your invoices and receipts. Stay in control of the time and hours you and your personnel work. Write all the spending into another column in your spreadsheet so that you can compare your expenses with your budgeted items and work out how much money you are using.

If you are starting to go over budget it means you will have to be more careful with further purchases or even cut back your project to make sure you stick to your budget. If it looks like you are under budget you might be able to finish the project and have some spare cash to kick off your next production.

Make Use Of Online Resources

There are also many online tools and resources which you can use to keep track of your budget online, some you will have to pay for but some are free. Using one of these systems will not only make life easier, but it will keep sure your budget safe on a secure server… just in case you lose your laptop while driving through a river in the Amazon. Here are just a few of these resources.

FreshBooks – Online accounting, billing, time-tracking, and bookkeeping.

Simplifythis – Appointment scheduling, invoices, payments.

Outright – Free easy to use online bookkeeping, (also integrates with FreshBooks).

Xero – A fully fledged online accounting system.

Don’t Overspend Stick To Your Budget

The worst thing you can do on your project is overspend. If you’re halfway through the project and about to interview someone important don’t go out spending money on new cameras or equipment unless you had included this in your budget. You went to all the hard work of preparing a budget, you started tracking all your spending, so don’t blow it by spending money on items you have not included in your budget.

The simple rule is that if it is not on your budget in the first place then you shouldn’t go out and spend money on it. Sure it might be nice to have but when you planned your project you obviously didn’t see that item as necessary. Careful planning and budgeting is only good if you actually make an effort to stick to your budget. So buy only what you have made allowances for in your budget and you should not have a problem with overspending.

With every project there are many aspects which come together to provide the overall result, but all of these elements take careful planning and consideration. In the first of our regular ‘Planning Your Project Series’ we examine how you can improve your project by setting, what I like to call, emotional goals.

Setting emotional goals refers to defining a direction or path for which you would like to take your audience. You need to take your viewers on a journey which not only tells your story effectively but delivers them to a point where they are willing to tell others about your project. Having an emotional goal will also help you clearly outline a plan for your entire project based on how you want your audience to feel at certain points in time.

Why Do I Need To Set Emotional Goals?

Deciding what you want to achieve emotionally from your project is important to making it successful. How the audience interacts and connects on a personal level will make a difference to whether people watch your project right through and especially whether they will share it with friends.

Think through all the projects, websites, films, which you have seen that you would never want to tell people about. What was wrong with them? Short of choosing a bad story, most people might answer one of the usual cliches such as ‘Oh it was boring’… or ‘it was a bad film’ – responses which indicate that you were emotionally unsatisfied. It is these responses which you want to avoid.

There are also many aspects of your project which will be decided on the goals you set for your audience, so it is important that you have an emotional goal in mind so you can connect different parts of your story with your audience.

Here is a short list of things, which may be affected by your choice of goal:

• What reaction you want people to have
• What equipment you decide to use
• What locations you decide to shoot in and how they are shot
• What questions you ask people
• What stories you include
• What music you choose
• Who you get to edit your project and how they edit it
• Whether you have a website and how it is designed

While it is clearly not an exhastive list, you probably get the picture – all of these things clearly rely on some kind of emotional direction. Being able to connect with your audience is key, and knowing where you want to take them is what makes your projects come to life.

How To Define Emotional Goals

Once you have decided to come up with an emotional goal for your audience, it’s important to think about what you want your audience to feel. There is going to be some very important questions which you need to ask yourself:

• Do you want them to be happy, or sad?
• Do you want them to feel empathetic, or apathetic?
• Do you want to really tug on their heartstrings or do you just want them to connect on superficial level?
• How do you want them to feel during your project?
• How do you want them to feel after they have seen your project?
• How do you want your project to be described to others?

There is no set key to defining the emotional goals which will work best for your project but all of the above questions will help you come up with goals that suit what you want to achieve.

One way to look at is by drawing out a small timeline of how you want your project to pan out. This timeline can be something you work on and revise throughout your project, but it represents the emotional journey you want people to take. Above the timeline might be happy points and below might be sad. You can gradually flesh this out as you get an idea of what your story might look like.

Your emotional goal will vary depending on each of your stories. If someone has had shocking events happen to them, and that is the focus of your story, you need to take that into consideration when thinking of your goal.

Inevitably your goals will change throughout the production of your project and that is perfectly OK. Emotional goals are simply guides which help give you some focus and direction for your project, but part of being a good storyteller is knowing how to adapt your project to changing situations.

Having an idea of where you want to take your audience will help give you a vision for your project. In the end this vision will help take your project to the next level.