Well as the past three weeks come to an end I am a bit glad I finally made it! It was a lot of work but I have really become swift in my audio editing skills!
I want to start off with talking about all the audio assignments. I sort of experimented with my bumper in what I wanted the rest of my audio assignments to sound like and I think I got a lot of good feed back.

It was this feedback that I received through my groups googlehangouts that I was able to really build and come up with a great commercial and by the time I was recording my audio story I knew my way around Audacity better than the back of my hand.


I think that being in a group while working on my ow individual project was a good dichotomy because I was able to see how people where interpreting the assignment for themselves as well as share ideas that I was having for my own work.
The next part of this weeks assignments was the Foley Challenge. I think for me this was by far the hardest part of this weeks assignments, and I have a much deeper appreciation for Foley artists now! For me I had seconds 00:30 – 1:00 and I thought this was a really good section to have especially it being my first time ever doing anything like this before. I had a lot of fun with this project but there is no doubt that it was difficult to get the right sounds. I used a myriad of different instruments including a cutting board, hard wood floors and a broom. What made this project easiest for me was to have my section on silent while I was recording my part in order to get the timing right, and I think this was the only thing that helped me get it right!

The third part to our audio assignments this week was to choose five stars worth of audio assignments from the audio assignment bank . For my first assignments I chose to go with the “Sardonic Mash-up” assignment. In which I remixed Tiger Wood’s apology and Beethoven’s Fur Elise. I had a lot of fun with this assignment because I sort of got to poke fun at Tiger Wood’s only in a very discreet manner. I think the timing aligned nicely on this assignment.

Then for my other star I decided to to the “Quote A Day” assignment in which I had to read a quote in a manner similar to the way in which I would have imagined the person to have said it. Then my audience would have to guess who said it. I chose a quote by Dr.Suess and then recorded it on http://audacity.sourceforge.net/, and downloaded it to Soundcloud.

For my Daily Creates I had a lot of fun in all of them, but chose to go with mostly writing and photography ones since this week was pretty heavy in audio assignments. We had to do 6 of them since we were making up for two weeks and as usual I loved them because they are a great way to flex my creative side!

The radio show had a bit of a rocky start but I am gad my group was able to set aside differences and come up with a really good end product! When it came to choosing a theme and how we would organize ourselves I felt that we all were eager to put in the work it would take to communicate openly and frequently. We did this mostly through our Googledoc and Twitter. It was not exactly easy coming to a decision on what our theme would be but I think we were all able to pull together to get it done when it got down to the wire. It was also mostly in our googlehangouts that we were able to decide a division of labor. I think the easiest part of working as a group was that we were all able to feed off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This was good because what one person wasn’t a pro at someone eles was and vise versa. What was hardes in my group at least was coming to consensus on things. It seemed most decisions there was at least one person who seemed strongly willed against one thing or another.
As far as my contribution to the group I tried to do whatever people needed. That meant organizing the googledoc, initiating conversations on twitter or pushing to have strict deadlines. I think we very evenly broke the labor up (with the exception of Amber who did a lot of the shows editing because she felt so comfortable with it) so that all of us did a fair amount of work. I think I pushed myself in that I really needed to be more comfortable and savvy with audio editing and I can comfortably say I am now.
I feel that our show holds up very well. I think that given where we came from at the beginning of this project to now we’ve come along way and even though we did loose a member the show still flows very nicely. I am proud of our show in that it runs as I’d imagine an actual talkshow would and I think it flows from speaker to speaker nicely. Our group absolutely met our goals in that we wanted a consistent show that everyone could agree to be apart of and I think that our end goal went above and beyond this, our audience will absolutely notice this.
I really can’t express how shocked I am at my own progress throughout this class. I walked into this class with no knowledge of blogging, sound editing, mash-ups or layering. I think that I have come lightyears away from where I was at the start of this class and that I have really reached a lot of goals so far the biggest one being that I am so much more knowledgeable about digital classes and the definition of digital storytelling.

Until Next Week,

Chelsea