These two (really three) weeks were CRAZY!

I learned a lot about Taylor Swift that I didn’t really need to know and that I should really read instructions.

I willingly restored my computer on Saturday because I just wanted a fresh start before I started working on my video project for a History seminar. I didn’t know (didn’t read close enough) that we needed to have workspace screenshots of our audio work this section, so I didn’t save the files that I already had exported to MP3–like the radio show, my commercial, and my bumper.

Other than my minor meltdown over that, check out my posts to hear more about my struggles!

Assignments

For these two weeks, we had to do 5 stars worth of assignments from the Audio Assignment Bank in addition to the required assignments on the checklist page.

• Foley Sounds — Holy Foley
• Radio Show Commercial — Propaganda
• Radio Show Bumper — Bumpin Bumper
• The Contest Nobody Could Win – ?? — Guess the Songs
• Music Tag – ??? — Lyric Tag

Dailies

Since we had three weeks (two weeks of class) we had six daily creates to accomplish.

I don’t usually do video daily creates, but for once, I manned up because I thought it would be funny. It definitely turned out that way.

Check out all my daily creates in this post here.

Radio Show

Our group got a head-start on the radio show. We met on February 21st to sort out the ideas. We decided that meeting in person would be the quickest way to get things done. While emailing was okay, it was hard to keep up with everyone’s emails.

We took about an hour to get going. I think most of us were just being indecisive and wanting to please everyone. We looked at the themes and none really stood out.

Our first idea, proposed by Kaitlyn and Brittany, was to do a show on Roadtrips. Each of us would talk about a Roadtrip and our experiences on it. I wasn’t too excited about this. I hate acting. I’m a bit self-conscious about it–I’ll admit it! I suggested Time Travel–I’m a History major after all. But I was the only one super excited about it.

We were kind of stuck here. So, we skipped to the format of our show. We weren’t really into the Fictional Story format. Interview Show seemed interesting, but with that warning on it, we were a bit concerned it wouldn’t be interesting enough. Finally, I started looking at Soundscape. I went into the audio assignment repository and started going through them.

I found this Celebrity Radio Interview one and loved it. I’m a big fan of The Soup which does this a lot. I proposed it to the group, and there was a little interest.

Somehow, we started talking about Taylor Swift. While Brittany is a huge fan of Taylor Swift, we all kind of liked the idea of “interviewing” her exes. We would take real interviews of each ex and then edit them to fit our questions about Taylor Swift. We would make it awkward and weird!

We decided everyone should interview one ex (or a false ex), and then I would put all the interviews together.

Sarah — John Mayer
Kaitlyn — Taylor Lautner
Brittany — Harry Styles
Me — T-Pain
Kelsie — Taylor Swift

At this time, we all thought our Radio Show was due on March 8, because we were only looking at the Radio Show details page. Brittany and Kaitlyn needed to get their interviews, bumpers, and commercials done early then, because they were going to Disney World for Spring Break.

Kaitlyn and Brittany made an EPIC outline for us. It detailed each step in the radio show and what each of us needed to accomplish.

Jump to Spring Break

We decided during our first group meeting to upload everything to SoundCloud. I downloaded each piece and got to work in Audition.

This took me much longer than I had originally planned.

My main goal was to make the radio show sound cohesive–like we were all sitting in the same room speaking to each other. With different computers, different microphones, etc.–I had to make the volumes of each recording somewhat balanced. I didn’t want listeners to suddenly be like OMG. MY EARS.

Before started working on this, I liked Taylor Swift’s music in a distant, wow this is catchy and I’ll never be able to escape it anyway kind of way.

As my friends and roommates have found out, however… I am definitely not a fan anymore.

You’re probably asking yourself, why? There’s only one song–technically two–songs of hers in the radio show? You’re so right! But I also listened to her instrumental versions of just about every song she has to find the right one that would go decently behind our radio announcers. On top of that, I had to have instrumentals for the opening bits of most of these songs.

Alas, I finished it despite my bleeding eardrums.

The Finale

After listening to our show a number of times, I wish we would have made our interviews “pre-recorded.” It would have been better to have, for instance in Harry’s interview, to put screaming girls in the background or something. I think it would have brought a lot more depth to the story.

I still think our story is rather hilarious, though. We’ve twisted the words of a lot of famous people (in all good fun, of course!).

I hope people laugh a little, wonder what’s going on, and then go look up to see if Taylor Swift really dated T-Pain.

Some Final Thoughts

I have to admit that working with audio these two weeks wasn’t that bad. Minus the Foley assignment, I actually enjoyed audio.

I was originally dreading the Group Radio Show. Having to banter live with someone is too much pressure so I was worried I’d mess it up. Luckily, my group didn’t want to do something like that anyways.

Don’t get me wrong, though; I still don’t love audio. I’m more of a visual person, and I doubt that’s going to change in the near future.