Sooooo the production of this radio show was pretty crazy and took a lot of coordination, input, and work from every member of the group. Each member of our group worked together to brainstorm ideas for the topic of our radio show and we came up with a family roadtrip with some awesome bonding time together. I really liked this idea because I thought it would make for a really good show and pretty easy to think of ideas for it.

The parts ended up working out really well with our group. We had four girls and one guy in our group and this was perfect because we had a mom and a dad and then three daughters, each with their own individual personality. Because this is an online course, we decided to use a GoogleDoc to brainstorm all of our ideas and this helped everyone to see everyone’s ideas and really super easy to collaborate with each other because we couldn’t really meet in person.

This GoogleDocs worked out really well for us because everyone could go off of each other’s ideas and we were able to work out exactly what we wanted our radio show to look like! Everyone inputed their ideas throughout the brainstorming process. This past Thursday night we decided to get together at the library and create the dialogue together. We all helped to think of the dialogue and we also put that on the GoogleDoc to make sure that we could all see it. Once we had all of the dialogue recorded, we recorded our voices and saved the files and exported them to one person. We made sure to have different sections of the roadtrip so that it would be really easy for someone to combine them all in the end.

My contribution to the radio show was throughout the whole process. I helped to brainstorm ideas for what we wanted to put in our show, specifically the roles/personalities of each person and what kind of events we wanted to take place in our adventurous roadtrip. I helped to think of dialogue together with the group and used a “country” accent to play the role of “Bill” the mechanic and to be the voice of the commercial. I also made my own individual recordings for several parts throughout the show: my personal thoughts before the trip, thoughts after halfway through the trip, and my thoughts for after we had reached our final destination.

I feel that our story came together really well as a whole! We combined elements of live dialogue, first-person thoughts as dialogue, and great sound effects to get the story from every possible angle. I think we effectively got across the story we wanted to tell. We wanted to convey a cranky, annoyed, frustrated family in the beginning that hardly wants to spend any time together to at the end, a happy, satisfied family that was just so grateful to end of where they did (in terms of actual location and their state of mind).

We’ve been working with audio for several weeks now and I feel like now I have a bit more of a handle on it than I did when we first began. At first, the concept of audio was really daunting because it was something I had never dealt with before and I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. Bit by bit as I did each assignment, I felt a got a little bit more of an understanding of it and how it works. I even was more excited to do Daily Creates that involved audio because it was something different and exciting! Like all things, once you practice them, it gets better and easier because when something is new and unknown, you can’t ever be expected to be perfect at it right away.

Overall, this was really fun to plan out and pull everything together! I really enjoyed brainstorming ideas for how we wanted the roadtrip to go along, thinking of events/places, thinking of the personalities of each character, and creating dialogue that would correlate with everyone’s individual personalities and reinforce and continue the plot. I can’t wait to hear it live Monday at 7:30 pm on ds106 radio!!!