It’s strange to do a weekly review for 2 weeks, and it’s  very bizarre to think that we’ve been in DS106 for 8 weeks now!

The radio show was the BIG project over the last 3 weeks, but we still have some other assignments to do.

Audio Assignments

• Radio Show Bumper– “Where everything is Golden!”
• Radio Show Commercial-Are you having trouble setting down into relationships? We can help!
• Foley Challenge– listen to my homemade sounds and dialogue for my section in The Circus!
• May I take your order?– See what I’m ordering in my “Southern” Accent from McDonald’s!
• Taking Back Spam– Listen in to my reading of a spam comment, from my blog, in my annoying/dramatic/OMG girl voice
• Movie Voice Machines– I created a voicemail message for the true Gossip Girl? Would she approve?

3 required assignments and 6/5 star points COMPLETE!

Daily Creates

Six daily creates sounds like a lot, until you realize you have three weeks to pull material from! I think I have a couple from each week. I even got to try making some origami using a post-it note! This class makes me get so creative! I love it!

Radio Show Reflection

Two weeks before Spring Break, the Fab 5 Group met to discuss our plan for the show. Many ideas were bounces around and honestly, I don’t even know how we choose the topic that we did. All I remember is someone bring up the idea of interview Taylor Swift and her “ex-boyfriends” and creating a show out of that. Brooke found an assignment in the audio section, where you mash up your voice and use clips from a celebrity’s voice to make an interview!
Once we decided on the main idea behind the show, we started thinking of specifics, like the show’s name. We all agreed upon “Serial dater” it sounds intriguing and one can argue that Taylor Swift really is a “serial dater,” she has dated a lot of guys!

Organization of the show:

• Kelsie chose to interview Taylor Swift. Brittany interviewed Harry Styles, I interviewed Taylor Lautner, Sarah interviewed John Mayer and Brooke interviewed T-Pain. Harry, Taylor and John all dated Taylor Swift. T-Pain and TSwift made a song together,no reports of them dating, but we thought it would be fun to incorporate him into the show.
• Both Brittany and I were going to be out of town all of Spring Break together. So we decided to work together and record all of our things and send them to Brooke before the start of Spring Break. Brooke agreed to compile the show together, all we had to do after recording our pieces was to make sure they were all downloadable on SoundCloud.
• Brittany and I met the Monday before Spring Break and developed a full outline of the show, there were still a few details to be ironed out, so we wrote this out just so we could all be on the same page. We sent it out to our group members to make sure they all agreed with the outline. After getting approval, Brittany and I did our own separate research on the guys we were interviewing and created our own questions and responses. Be did record our commercials together. Everything was recorded on my computer, since Brittany’s mic is so static-y.

The easiest part about working as a group was that we all came to an agreement on our theme in a reasonable amount of time. We also worked well together and dividing the project up was no problem at all. We all agreed on which parts we would cover. I also felt that everyone in the group has a really strong work ethic, so I never had to fear or worry about people not completing their assignments on time, which is alway a toss-up in group projects.

The hardest part about working as a group– this is hard to say, because I feel that we did work well together. Even though Brittany and I were not here over Spring Break, we completed our work well in advance. I only thing that I can think of is that we only met together once in person and conducted the rest via email. It really wasn’t a problem, but I like to meet in person. I guess we could have made sure every detail was ironed out at the initial meeting, but little details are bound to come up afterwards, regardless.

As mentioned above, I chose Taylor Lautner as my interviewee. I had never done an assignment like this before and I was a it nervous about how long it would take me to find the clips I needed it. As I searched on Youtube, I became more worried, because most of the time Taylor was discussing something in regards to the Twilight Saga and about him being a werewolf or referring to his character in the films, Jacob. Also, if he was on a TV show, every time after he spoke women would scream. I was nervous about trying to edit it all out. In the end, I am happy with the result. This assignment was a challenge for me, but it pushed me in the right way and helped me learn and grow in my strengths of using Audacity.

After listening to the show that Brooke complied together, I am pleased. Since we didn’t all record this together, using the same computer there are some differing sounds in the microphones, which is noticable to me. But this is somewhat inevitable when we all used different devices to record our interviews with. I feel like everyone’s interviews demonstrated the purpose of the whole theme “serial dater” and together it flows nicely.

I would hope that people would enjoy the show. Hopefully they even get a few laughs out of it as well. It’s hard for me to imagine what other’s will say about the radio show. I am interested to hear their feedback and get some constructive criticism. I can imagine that they might address the different sounding microphones, but other than that I am just not sure. I can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks!

Audio Reflection

Oh, audio. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either! Audio is obviously a very important part of Storytelling, digital or not. All of the audio assignments have been enjoyable, except maybe the foley assignment. But that’s mainly because it was so out of my comfort zone! But I feel that I learned a lot from the past few audio weeks. Honestly, without this class I would have never known how to use Audacity. How to layer sounds or create bumpers, commercials and mash up interviews from Youtube videos. So while I might have preferred  photography week or design week over audio, I realize that I’ve learned a lot from these audio weeks.

I really had no expectations for audio week when it all began, because I had NO idea what to expect. It definitely has been interesting and informative. The radio show was fun because it allowed us a lot of room for creativity and use the skills we’ve learned. I’m thankful for learning what I’ve learned through this past couple of weeks of audio. But I won’t be too sad to say goodbye! I’m sure one way or another I’ll be using audio for another ds106 assignment.

So audio: it’s been real, it’s been fun; it’s been real fun. But I’ll see ya later!