We have a commercial, a bumper, and a preview, and I am relieved.  It is great to have some sounds made — any at all — after how stuck we were in our brainstorming session on Monday.  Tim and I had discussed some very vague ideas in the previous week and had been looking to old time radio shows for inspiration.  I was envisioning a single narrative that would span the entire show, much like some of the Radiolab episodes I listened to which were broken into several 20 minute-ish segments which built the whole show.

What that narrative would be proved much trickier.  None of us seemed to have any burning stories to tell and the conversation shifted toward our structural approach: did we want interviews, a Q&A advice segment, debates? More traditional/literal storytelling? Somehow out of all of that I was talking about loving mountains and Rachel told us that she was about to go on her first ever camping trip and our nature theme was born.  We divided up tasks for making the first commercial and bumper and drafts of our segment scripts.

Yesterday we met to record.  Everyone brought a bit of the script and voiced different characters for the show.  About an hour and a half produced ten or so usable tracks, along with a couple mess-ups littered with laughing and cursing. It was good to hear at least a rough version of how these things will actually sound.  I assembled all those tracks into what is now our preview, which I think of more as a rough draft than an actual, polished advertisement.  The DJ script was done impromptu in our recording session and needs some smoothing out, and I think we need to get more adventurous with sound in general: more effects, music, a background track — something.

But it’s coming together.  Hoping we can brainstorm some of these things and get to work in tonight’s class.  I am revising my main contribution — a segment inspired by one of my favorite ghost stories — and practicing how to sound terrified out of my mind (I am much too calm and kind of sleepy in the preview version).  We haven’t even discussed the design portion yet, but I have this condition where I doodle all the time… can’t help it, already have a few ideas sketched out.

Here are our sounds so far:

Tim’s commercial:

Abbie put together our first bumper:

And finally, a preview of sorts: