The other day someone asked me to post an old student film online. Easy enough, right?
Problem is, this innocent little film contains an inordinate amount of F-bombs, as well as an entire monologue centered around tits.
Being the classy, considerate person that I am, I decided I would need to bleep some fucking words out.
I immediately began to dread the prospect of bringing my audio into ProTools, finding the right sound effect to use, then tediously placing it over the waveform.
But then I found this awesome tutorial by Andy Coon on FCProducer.com, and all my worries were bleeped away. In a nutshell: you just overwrite the desired section’s audio with bars and tone! Simple.
2 Comments
Good tip – that’s definitely the easiest way and it can even be kinda fun and funny under the right circumstances. I used to have to do that at Current a lot.
But, as I’ve seen this self-censorship phenomenon around the Web, I’ve been wondering why do this? I mean, obviously there are circumstances where it makes sense to do so, depending on audience. But I find it interesting that we are so used to the bleep of TV standards and practices that we start doing it voluntarily, sometimes in venues where it’s totally unnecessary. Is there something comfort-food about the bleep?
hey thanks for reading, you make a great point. what is it about the bleep? on a subconscious level there might be something there, having spent the majority of my youth glued to the jerry springer show and real world.
but i do believe that parents should have a choice in what their children are exposed to at a young age, rather than the children themselves, and i simply don’t want to be responsible for breaking in a young child’s ears to the tune of “fuck” and “tits” once they accidentally stumble upon my vimeo page.
i guess for me it’s more a question of, what is it about these words that make them socially taboo in the first place, and should those taboos be broken? i guess it’s a personal decision every artist must make for herself, so thanks for pointing out that we do indeed have that agency on the wild wild web.