When I read the assignments for this week, I became a little nervous. I’ve never really done anything audio related before. However, this week turned out to be really fun and a pleasant experience!

Audio Storytelling

After watching two videos  from Ira Glass on audio storytelling and a short clip from Jad Abumrad, I wrote down all the “nuggets” I pulled from their videos. Below I will share one  very key “nuggets” from both Mr. Glss and Mr. Abumrad. To read a more detailed review on the videos, read this post.

Two Key “nuggets”

• Storytelling is about “building blocks.” There are two parts to this: 1) Sequence of Actions- raise questions constantly, 2) Moment of reflection -the point of the story, the bigger something. -Ira Glass
  
• There is a co-authorship/co-imagining process going on between the radio host and the listener. The radio host speaks the works, but it’s up to the listener to “paint” the picture.-Jad Abumrad

Radio Story

I listened to Doppelgänger- This American Life, by Ira Glass and Fred Arminsen.

Warning: If you think it will be about celebrity doppelgängers, like me, you are wrong! It’s very different but very interesting! Here is my post, reviewing the radio show.

The show encompassed two different stories. But what I liked about the stories were the way they were edited and presented to the viewer. In the first story about the calamari, Mr. Glass plays parts of  phone interview and layers his voice over it with background information on the interviewee and the result of the interview. In the second story with the two men, I liked how he picked 7 ways they were similar and aligned their stories together. Switching between the two men’s stories kept my interest.

DS106 Radio

I was unable to catch ds106 Radio during a live segment. But during my hour of listening I was able to listen to some music and two stories.

Audio Assignments

The first assignment was to create a ds106 radio bumper (10-30 seconds long) . After listening to the videos, this was the first assignment I did. I was unfamiliar with Audacity, but after watching the tutorial from Cogdog I felt more comfortable with the program. Making the bumper was pretty easy, but it didn’t come without some drama. Feel free to take a listen below, you can read more about the drama here.

The second assignment was to create a sound effects story– using 5 different sounds, under 60 seconds. I found all my founds on freesound.org and used Audacity to layer it all together. I am really happy with how this assignment turned out. For a more detailed explanation of this assignment, read this post.

Daily Creates

This week we had to complete 3 daily creates. I completed Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday‘s daily creates. For the full post, click here. Below is are pictures/audio of my daily creates!

Groups

So far, this week, Leah has left some very sweet comments on the blog! She was very nice and had some great things to say! Thank you! I haven’t heard from anyone else this week. I was able to comment on everyone’s blog twice, except Leah’s because she doesn’t have any new posts up (as of now). I enjoyed listening to the other audio bumpers and stories from my group-mates and seeing what they came up with. I feel that we all have different styles and methods of completing our tasks, which is really interesting to see.

Reflection

It’s been another fun, yet challenging week for DS106. I’m happy to say that I survived this week, because at the beginning I wasn’t sure that I would. Have some many helpful tutorials and being able to tweet and get immediate responses from @Cogdog is AMAZING! I got a lot of great feedback this week, which really is awesome! I feel like I’m putting a lot of hard work and effort into this class and my blog, so it makes me feel good to get good feedback. While I did learn a lot from Ira Glass’s videos, my fear is that I won’t be able to really implement his ideas into my digital storytelling assignments. Of course I know he is an expert and has been doing it for years. But I just have this fear that even though I’ve learned about storytelling and what makes a good story, I still will not be able to make it happen. (Maybe this is crazy talk.)