Ira Glass and Jad Abumrad gave some helpful hints. I think audio can be less forgiving sometimes, in that it’s completely up to the narrator to create imagery and things, but after listening to Glass and realizing it can take a while to perfect, I feel a lot better. Glass believes anecdotes are key as well as recapping and kind of telling the listener why this story is so important. Abumrad was less long-winded and talked about how the lack of pictures was what made radio so special. It’s a shared experience between the narrator and the listener, which is a really interesting concept. (I wonder how creative commons would license that).

Here’s the notes on my radio story. Basically, this boy named Bobby Dunbar was kidnapped and there’s this huge trial after a woman comes out claiming Bobby, once he is found, is actually her kidnapped son (a little Changeling a la Angelina Jolie anyone?). However, the courts think Bobby is Bobby.  Anyway, it leads to huge family drama and a Hatfield/McCoy situation when a granddaughter starts investigating. Here‘s the link to the story. (SPOILER ALERT: the lady who we think is crazy, Julia Anderson, is actually right and Bobby is in fact Bruce and not a Dunbar at all).

The ds106 radio became a very interesting listening experience. I really liked that once I followed them on twitter, it would tweet the song or bumper that was playing. Much like Pandora, I often find songs I like and want to download them myself on iTunes. This makes it really easy to do that.  Here’s my post on the experience. It seems jumbled because I was writing the post while listening, and also trying to pull from my earlier listening experience (woo, multitasking!). ds 106 radio was something I could see myself doing homework to, listening to around the house, and just any time listening. It’s such a dynamic show that I feel like it will be a great experience to make our own shows for it.

My radio bumper may not be what entails one. I forget what post I read from the assignments page, but it had pulled from the movie When Harry Met Sally. I decided Bridesmaids was the way to go, because Kristen Wiig is brilliant. (see Penelope, Target Lady, and her as Kathie Lee Gifford). The airplane scene in Bridesmaids is the most memorable part for me. I pulled the audio into an mp3 using a help guide on ehow. Once I got the audio, I clipped it into the one I wanted, which I put into Audacity. I had earlier recorded myself, and put that into the same Audacity as well. I simply placed my recording at the end of the clip I selected from Bridesmaids. I exported it as an mp3 and then later uploaded it to Soundcloud. I really liked experimenting with different methods for this as well.

My sound effects story is kind of cliche, but in a good way hopefully. The storms that ripped through Virginia at the end of June were the first time I can ever remember being actually scared during a storm. My sister’s girlfriend works at Home Depot and they had gathered all the customers there in the employee break room. My sister is in the Army and stationed in El Paso, Texas. She called the house to tell my other sister and I to go get in the basement. The sounds we heard were terrifying and there was no way to really see what was going on. Then, as soon as it came, it was gone. Looking around at the devastation, it really only took about 30 minutes to happen. I chose my five sounds on freesound.org, which is detailed in my post. I overlapped them in Audacity because during storms, it’s never an ended action. When it’s hailing, it’s also thundering. The beginning garden chimes is my creative liberty which I did because I love the movie Twister. After exporting the mp3, I uploaded it to Soundcloud.

DAILY CREATES!!!

First:

I made a picture holding 3 NCIS disk cases

I love NCIS and have been attempting to finish the ninth season while taking 18 credits and working 35 hours a week. When I read the post, these were the nearest objects.

Second:

This one I had trouble with, as noticed from my video

It took a long time for me to figure out how to do a voiceover. I did like exercising my creativity, but I should have used Audacity to record myself instead of the built in Windows sound recorder (this was also made more difficult with my roommate busting in several times and interrupting my recording.).

Third:

My artistic skills are lacking so I decided to write about my undying love of mini-golf instead.

The most wonderful thing about mini-golf is that each hole can have a different winner, making everyone a winner. I wrote in paint, with my own hand and tried to use colors I see in relation to mini-golf.

REFLECTION TIME:
This week was probably the most challenging week for me. I hadn’t worked in depth with audio before, but I found Audacity easy enough to use. It took a lot more troubleshooting than I had planned on. In my weekly summary and individual posts, I went through the process and this summary started getting text heavy so I tried to make things more concise. The daily creates are still surprising me with my own need to create and show creativity. I liked the American Life story of Bobby Dunbar probably the most, besides the ds106 radio experience. Bobby Dunbar is just a fascinating story on it’s own but NPR really outdid themselves with the narrators and main narrator helping weave all the sub-narrator’s story together. I also am becoming more comfortable hearing myself talk, which I always struggled with watching family videos that I had recorded of myself long ago. I am looking forward to the radio show, and I am challenging myself to pay more attention to audio now. (I am off to comment on other people’s blogs now:))