I am surprised, my team is done with the commercial, preview and bumper. How did that happen, considering we were all over the place with ideas on Monday night. Believe me, we weren’t stuck on ideas, we just had way too much ideas, it was figuring out exactly what to do. I first suggested a “what if” radio show which everyone thought was a good idea, but for a 30-minute radio show there aren’t that many “what if” questions to ask that fall in the same category. Since we wanted to be consistent, we immediately ruled that out. Again, I suggested a show on our most memorable moments our most embarrassing moments, a show that will include interviews of real UMW students, we were deadlock on that too. Then someone suggested a nature show, I think Rachel did.  I wasn’t totally opposed to the idea, i just wasn’t sure how I could contribute to the groups success on a topic I am not well vested in.  Now the group had to win me over. At least we were making some progress, while other teams were worried about coming up with team names, we were more concerned with dividing the roles evenly and getting the work done. Tim, our hands on guy was put in charge of all the recordings that required a masculine voice. Our dear Miss Hannah wrote the script for the commercial which I thought she did a great job on, I was put in charge of putting our bumper together to compliment the theme of the radio show. We met the next day in the recording studio ready to get the work done, while Liz worked on the preview, Rachel, Tim and I recorded the sounds for the commercial and bumper. I thought this was the fun part. For the commercial, I played the part of Miss Suzy, the graham cracker expert, Tim was the DJ who was making it all happen and Rachel played Maud, the girl stuck in some forest somewhere, angry that her tent didn’t make it to the end. We spent two hours playing around with audacity, trying to export files in the right form, as in WAV and MP3 instead of aup, or data to make them easy to upload and work with.

It took me about half an hour to put the bumper together, we already knew that our nature theme had to be incorporated in it, so, I consulted almighty  freesounds.org for the sounds of birds chirping in the morning, water running down a stream and bears howling. Sounds scary, but well what do you expect when you think nature. DUH!  We wanted to be consistent with this as well, so while the chirping of the birds played in the background, Tim the DJ introduced the audience to the theme of the show and what it is all about and then in the end, a little shout-out to yours truly #ds106. Like I said, putting the bumper together wasn’t at all difficult, it was a matter of aligning them according to how we wanted it to sound, reducing and increasing the volume where necessary. After making two bumpers, my group members all agreed that the second one was better and so we chose the 17 second bumper for our radio show.

Team work was one of the keys to making the preview, bumper and commercial a success. We all pulled our weight, and when we thought a group member had way too many responsibilities, we made an effort to decrease their work load. Definitely a great team. There is more to come with our show, but its a secret, I can’t let you in on that, so stay tuned and watch out for “the team that shall not be named”. Scary huh?