Haley, Dan, Paul, Rob, and Me.

Remember that list.  It’s the Dream Team.  You don’t even know.

When teams first started opening up to be formed, and I saw this one started, I did something I never usually do.  I asked to join in with this group.

It must be something about having kids, getting older, or something.  I just don’t care as much anymore (read: at ALL).  I wanted to be in the group, so I asked.  And being good people, they didn’t try to come up with a reason to not let me join.

Almost immediately, we were communicating via our own chat room that one of us had built (Haley or Dan?) and then a Google Doc and the chat within that, also.  We started brainstorming, and by the time we got together the first time at Blackstone Coffee across the street from UMW, we were clear that we wanted to do a zombie drama.  We put together a basic skeleton of a show, laughed our bums off over the strongest coffee I’ve ever met, and went on our merry ways.

By the next time we had gotten together, we were ready to get our script put together.  Haley, being a master word-crafter, translated all of our good (and not-so-good) ideas into beautiful, well-crafted story and scripting.  We decided we would each get a bumper and a commercial put together, and be working on our personal characters in the story itself.

The following week, we realized that we really just wanted to be ourselves for the show.  Granted, we were going to be *slightly* exaggerated versions of ourselves, but overall, we were just gonna be us…post zombie-apocalypse.  So developing our own characters was also added to our lists of things we were going to be largely responsible for.

Since I laugh a lot, I often get treated as a rather stupid person.  I like to run with that, when I can, just for the fun of it.  When I realized that the script was heading in such a direction that enabled us to have fun with getting to know the radio station we were taking over, I decided to try out doing a bad bumper and see how it worked out.

Here’s what I came up with for that part.

Being that I was having so much fun with this part, and since Haley was rocking the commercials, she and I decided to switch, and I ended up with two bumpers, and she had 2 commercials.  My second bumper was supposed to reflect my improvement since getting to the station in learning how to work everything.  It ended up a little bit like this.

I also thought about making another bumper, designed to be recorded by Matt, our guest speaker, so that we would have a radio station bumper from before he was gone, which would be what was being played and cycled through automatically until we figured out what was going on.  Daniel recorded Matt doing it, but at that point, it was just easier for him to put that clip directly into the show.  I also liked how Daniel had the idea to layer the chatter of the station over my commercials in spots.  It had a rather awesome effect on the bumpers themselves.

If we were to have used my commercial, it would have been the same one from Jingle Jangle, but with a little bit of narrative before and after the jingle.

It was a blast recording this show, and it was even more awesome to get to work with the crew I ended up with for this project.  Flat-out awesome people.

When it was time to edit the show, we all hopped onto Google Hangouts and went to work.  Even that was rather awesome.  We were productive and entertained each other rather well.  It was neat to get to see how our dynamics all worked together for this project.

I can’t wait until Monday night after class (holy cow that’s tomorrow night!!!).  I’ll be going over to Haley’s to listen to the show after my 6-9 class is over, so I don’t miss it while I’m driving home from school.

Best. Group Project. Ever.  Cuz #ds106 does it right.