Our group (Brian Brown, Jack Mulrey, and Chelsea Mageland) met up yesterday and did work.  We got to use the recording equipment in room 307 in Dupont, which was awesome.   The microphone was the most legitimate piece of audio recording equipment I have ever seen in real life, and I felt a little bit like we were in a recording studio from a radio station, ( and maybe we were?).  It was a pleasant experience despite the time of day, the fluorescent lights, and the lack of available electric outlets for dying computers.  Brian had created a Google Doc earlier last week with some brainstorming notes of potential ideas.  He and Jack had a rough outline as to what they thought the show could be about – a mystery on campus that caught the  student body’s attention.  There was potential for a supernatural object or being, but whether or not it was going to be used was not yet established.  This all sounded good to me, so we began writing the script.

We met up in Monroe, and when I got there Brian and Jack had already began writing.  They planned to have a radio announcer, a narrator, and two students during the first segment of interviews.  They also wanted to have a scientist come and give an expert opinion as to what they believed happened.  I took the job of creating the script for the expert, Brian and Jack continued to work on Act 1, and for the next hour and a half we went to town typing up dialogues between different characters in our story.

At this point, we didn’t even know what the mystery was going to be.  The pronoun “it” was frequently used during this period of uncertainty.  I found some humor to this gender neutral word floating around representing an unknown object/creature/event, similar to the indecision we were experiencing at the time.  After taking a few breaks, like to go to class and eat dinner with friends and family, we met up again and finished the script.  The script ended up being long, too long, and we realized we needed to cut some stuff out. We took out parts that seemed necessary to the story, and then we were good to go.  At this point, it was time to turn on the mic and give it a shot.

Jack was microphone and Audacity savvy.  He took charge in clicking the “Record” and “Stop” buttons, as well as deleting bad takes and naming sound clips.  I can’t speak for Brian and Jack, but I was actually pretty nervous when it came time to sit down infront of the mic and read.  We took turns gathering around the mic, sitting in chairs arranged in ways that our voices would be best absorbed when reading our lines.  We separated the script into smaller segments, hoping to reduce the number of takes we would need to do.  We still did a lot of takes, but I think breaking the script up made it a lot easier as it gave us breaks and let us use recorded material that wasn’t contaminated by misread lines and awkward inflections.  I really thought it was going to be easy, but the number of takes that we did is evidence that it was actually much more difficult than anticipated.   The main mistakes we found ourselves making were reading too quickly and stumbling on words in the script.  We came to the conclusion that if we thought something felt awkward, it would be best to sort of improvise on the spot and say what felt more natural at the time.  I think this made a big difference.

Brian had typed up a script for the first commercial.  He and Jack recorded the commercial and Brian put the five minute segment together.  He used Audacity and added sounds to different parts of the interview, organizing it with breaks of music in between different interviews.  I am amazed by how everything is coming along.

Here is a 5 minute clip of  the show

In addition, here are a few short clips from each group member reflecting on the process so far

PHOTO CREDIT:

( for the bricks in the background of the poster) http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/g8-nations-hit-brick-wall-on-climate.html