I was back out to Coul Links this week flying the drone to capture the normal series of 40 rephotography images and additional video plus some aerial views of the felled tree plantation I had not done before.

Wind and weather have made it difficult to fly in the past two months and I was happy to have the opportunity.  Additionally, I acquired a decent quality, very sensitive, sound recording device and I began experimenting with it this week. Unfortunately, the first day I chose to do work, the RAF jets from Lossiemouth, which had been fairly idle in recent weeks, were flying at the Tain Bombing Range just across the Dornoch Firth and the noise of the jets was saturating the recordings of natural sounds.

I went back out a couple of days later early in the morning to experiment more with capturing sound and then working with the files in Adobe Audition to create tracks that could be laid into Adobe Premiere.  I also did several minutes of recording of people at a public gathering prior to event when they were all chatting among themselves and it created a nice murmur of what are clearly people, but without anything specific being discernible, so it became essentially the noise that I wanted to capture.

Now a week later I have assembled the sound tracks and photo presentation in Adobe Premiere and did a preview with Wendy.  The sound track needs to improve significantly, but Wendy did like the concept.  She also suggested I rethink the fonts and the typed narrative.

I have been out capturing more raw sound files and working with Adobe Audition to tweak the files before importing them to Premiere.  Sound quality is improving, but needs to be better.

I have rethought both as well as the backgrounds and moved from black to white backgrounds, made the font smaller and reduced the repetitive words in the narrative to let the story unfold more simply.  I have added photos and altered the way they sequence in and produced a better sound track, though it still has lots of room for improvement.