To draw in listener’s interest to my group’s radio show, I created a commercial to convince them to stay tuned.  Since the theme of our show centered around soundscapes, I loosely based my commercial idea around the audio assignment Make Your Own Ringtone from the ds106 assignment bank.  

First, I wrote out what I wanted to say and recorded it via Audacity.  I made sure to use as much pep as I could muster to sound like an infomercial.  I googled funny phone videos and found Post Bank “Who’s Phone is This?” on YouTube.  I downloaded the video from YouTube via the program Fastest YouTube Downloader and opened the file in Audacity.  The whole video is pretty funny, but I only used the part where the gentleman says “Does anyone know who’s phone this is?” to reinforce what I had said in my commercial.  To remind listeners what the old boring ringtones sounded like, I used a YouTube video called Original Nokia Tune 3310, which I also downloaded and opened in Audacity.

I wanted to keep the energy of the commercial quick and upbeat since it’s meant to be a short segment to grab the listeners attention, so I used the song Home by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros to play in the background.  I uploaded the song into Audacity from my iTunes and trimmed the portions I wanted to use.  I then lowered the songs volume so it wouldn’t overpower my talking and used fade in/fade out to make the transitions sound better. Finally, I put a snippit of the Twilight Zone theme song at the end of the commercial to reinforce the twilight theme of our radio show, and to have listeners hear what the ringtone would sound like.  I got the song from a YouTube video called The Twilight Zone Theme.

It took a lot of work to make all the parts meld together right, but I really enjoyed this assignment. I’m very pleased with the end result and I think it actually kind of sounds like a legit radio show commercial! It wasn’t difficult at all to make it last 30-45 seconds.  In fact, I had to cut some parts out and shorten the twilight song in order to make the commercial under 45 seconds.