POST INTERVIEW
✎ Another mistake was my questions. A couple of them, listening back, were empty questions
which I needn’t have asked and which, other than one sentence, I took no audio from for my clips. Using The Empty Property Strategy as guidance for my questions, I addressed both the strategy and the issue of second homes (which to be fair is addressed within the document).
However, I found that whilst doing my editing- I couldn’t fit both of these topics into one clip, or one 2 minute piece. What is it George said? Figure out your Top Line first. I’d started editing and putting together clips about second homes, but I’d only actually asked two questions about second homes and I didn’t have enough material to cover second homes in my 2 minute 45 second clip. Therefore when it came to writing my cue, I couldn’t do it. If I made it entirely about second homes that would make part of my clip (that covered TEPS) irrelevant. So, I had to do it solely on TEPS as I had much more material on it, but that made the second homes stuff useless *breathe*.
✎ As I’ve mentioned, editing was a bit of an issue. I spent far too long faffing and changing things (I must have changed my audio clips so many times, cutting out pieces and pasting in other pieces here and there repeatedly). I am starting to get better at being more brutal with editing thogh- as in choosing particular clips and disregarding others.
It wasn’t all bad- I did manage to correct some things. Certain things I caught myself doing in time to correct myself, like using elaborate language in my cue, e.g the word depleting. I was so proud of myself having had such a word pop into my head. Brilliant I thought! I realised a couple of minutes later that that’s exactly the kind of language I shouldn’t be using! Then I got over zealous and changed ‘to ensure that more’ to ‘in order to make more.’ I kept it in though…
I still have a lot, a load, a ton, a mountain, an Everest worthy amount of things to learn. And I admit it is quite surreal and … well, odd, coming from an English Literature specialised background where you’re required to use as sophisticated vocabulary as possible to this, where you’re required to drop every clever word you’ve ever learned! (joke) Both my mum and brother read a lot and like to throw around fancy words in their conversation- my dad is also ridiculously clever (he gets nearly every answer correct on University Challenge) so I get supremely praised (albeit condescendingly) when I use words like castigated in every day conversation.
And now I am to forget all of that and adopt the simplistic approach, or at least switch it off when needed. It’s quite a change, it’s a profound new skill- but I’m embracing it!