DLP narration + classroom audio

I finally completed the task of adding classroom audio from both schools to the narration for the Dual Language Program production. Finding suitable clips from the classes in English was not a problem, of course. I even managed to glean what I needed from the Spanish side of the kindergarten class, but I could only get the bare gist of the Spanish at the fourth grade level. That last hurdle was cleared when my bilingual daughter came over to listen to the few audio clips I had prepared from more than an hour's worth of recording. As a brand new mother, my daughter's time and attention span was limited, so this meant sitting down with her at my computer – grandson in arms – and reviewing three brief audio clips that had sounded promising to my ear.

What contributed to the final decision had more to do with extraneous classroom noise than with content. Although I had carefully monitored my recordings in the classroom, I was astonished over the general noise level that remained in the audio: a warbling wall of student babble in the background, punctuated with goose-like noises from desks and chairs scooting across linoleum. Our choices of clean sound bites were severely limited, but I settled on an exchange between the Spanish teacher and the entire class going over a point of Spanish grammar. This would roll out of a brief clip of the English teacher discussing a vocabulary word with his small reading group. Those few seconds of classroom audio were all that would be used from a couple of hours spent with the Spanish portion of the fourth grade class, but that was all that was needed.

So now I had both narration and classroom audio combined for the production, and it all timed out at 2:48. In order to complete the audio, I had two more interviews to line up: one with the English-speaking parents of a fourth grader for quotes on their initial reservations about signing their kindergartner up for the DLP program five years ago and how it seemed to be going for their child now, and the other with the Spanish-speaking parents of a fourth grader on what their child had gained from dual language education. It would be a challenge to add all this to the audio and still keep the production time down around three minutes, but I'd deal with that when the time came for the final tightening edit.