Topic: Create a 1 minute advertisement directed towards potential SkillsUSA members that explains how SkillsUSA can connect you to career success.
This year, Taylor Vella and I had the honor of taking 1st place in the SkillsUSA NC State competition with this audio piece. We incorporated everything that we had learned over the past few months; voiceovers, interviews, background music, making sure you're in a good recording spot, balancing levels, and perfecting our recording technique. The final product is something we're super proud of!
In-depth Analysis
The process for competition was a lot different than how we had been doing it because we couldn't use wifi (Google Docs was our main method of script writing), couldn't use our laptops to write our script (we had to handwrite it), and weren't allowed to go back and listen to what we had recorded for interviews because we had to leave our laptops in the editing room that we couldn't go into until after lunch, and weren't allowed to record anything after we came back into the room because it was our "editing time".
Another problem we faced was that we didn't have a soundproof editing room like we do at school. At the convention center, there was a room between the outside doors and inside that was basically soundproof. Our microphone was a dynamic omnidirectional (RE50) mic that did a really good job of isolating the sound from our interviewee, so background noise was minimal, which made editing it really easy.
Since our recording/editing was timed and regulated by the competition, we had to change up our process a little and wrote the entire script before even recording our interviews. This forced us to word our questions to get an exact answer from our interviewees without telling them exactly what to say. We interviewed Peyton Holland, Abbey Carr, Delaney Mizell, and Tommy McCullough and only ended up using Peyton and Tommy. Both of them spoke really eloquently and genuinely, giving us the perfect sound bites to use that fit our script and were the right amount of time.
After recording our interviews, we went back to our hotel to record ourselves. By reading each section of our script multiple times, we were able to record with different inflections and make sure that we had everything we needed, since we couldn't go back and record after we entered the editing room.
Overall, I felt that we were very prepared for our competition through our practice audio sessions and
