Malaysians, the Olympics and DIY audio - preparing, recording and editing

(Download it at: https://sites.google.com/site/mp3hostshauntey/olympic-test-mp3/Theolympictest.mp3?attredirects=0&d=1)

This idea started as something that I considered doing for the BBC Community Reporter project, but it was far too vague to actually get commissioned as a story.

So my basic idea was find out what Malaysians thought about the Olympics and where their loyalties lay. It was going along the same lines that a comedy piece I heard on Radio 4 called the "Sinha Test" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012fs6y). I chose it because it was simple. I did it on Malaysians because they were available and I knew Malaysian Chinese people well enough to get the responses I wanted, particularly when trying to get them to talk about Malaysian issues (such as Korean soaps and the Malaysian government's racial policies).

Doing the interviews was pretty difficult at first. I recorded my mother and my cousin (Christina) - both of whom produced interviews that were completely unusable. Both interviews were a bit too formal - the answers just didn't seem natural. This was largely due to fact that I was still figuring about how to ask all of these questions, whilst using the equipment - plus I kept referring to the questions I wrote down.

The questions came a lot more naturally when I focused on getting the basic answers that I wanted (what sport would they want to see, would they support Britain or their home country, why). I essentially wanted to get to understand the logic of why each person supported who they did.

- Joseline seemed to support Singapore due to her patriotism and love of underdogs.

- Audrey didn't appear to link her support to any patriotic loyalty, supporting teams that she liked (either due to ability or their looks).

- Chin Kong - seemed to ultimately hold the idea of loyalty to one's country of origin (despite his initial claim that it depended on who was an underdog)

- May Ling - seemed to support Britain outright from the beginning, so I had to try and pin down why this was and establish why she appeared to have no loyalty to the country of her birth. She reflected the simple idea of sports support being linked to one's loyalty to a nation in its purest form.

After I did the interviews I could work out what point I wanted to get out of each guest and edit out the rest. Each interview was 4-5 minutes. So I removed quite a lot from each interview (particularly Joseline, since I could sum up her view very quickly).

In order to figure how to edit it I followed a tip I read in This American Life's 'Radio, An Illustrated Guide'. After a long session recording in the field they would get an intern to (roughly) transcribe all of the recording in real time without pausing. This was really helpful, since it got me to listen to everything - plus having a rough transcript made it a lot easier to work out what I wanted to cut.

Also, I spent a large amount of time editing out all my "umms" and "ahhs" - something that I will have to try and reduce in the future (though the "umms" and "ahhs" made the interviews a lot less formal - and I think they helped to get some more natural answers from interviewees)