Radio Week is going to be a summary of week 7 and week 8…mostly of week 8 because I did some group radio work and some Daily Creates in week 7, but then went home and relaxed and did NOTHING for the first time in a long while! Anyways, these two weeks were low on amount of work required, but when you got down to doing the assignment, it was easy to tell why…Audio takes time to manipulate and create something good. And it takes even more time to come up with something amazing. I never really worked with audio before this week, but I’m pleased with what I was able to produce. (I was also ecstatic that we were done using GIMP!!) Anyways, to start the week, we had to complete 10 stars of Audio Assignments:

Assignment#1 – 2 Stars: This assignment asked us to record a sound that may be familiar to ourselves, but not necessarily others. (I also wrote a little…poem?)
Assignment#2 – 2 Stars: This assignment wanted us to act like we we’re ordering from McDonald’s and order with an accent…I used my Disney Alien Accent
Assignment#3 – 1 Star: This assignment was to Mimic a cartoon voice, so I took a clip out of a movie, and did a voice-over of the character’s line! Check it out!
Assignment#4 – 2 Stars: I may have just done wrong, but at the same time, I think I transformed a legend’s track into a decent Chipmunk version…if you don’t get it, click the link!
Assignment#5 – 3 Stars: Lastly, I gave the contest a shot. I failed miserably, but I still came up with a piece of audio that runs…almost smoothly…and has a little story to go with it. I think it was the toughest assignment for the week!

Another assignment we had to do was recycle some of our unused media. (Good thing I took extra pictures!) We’re apparently sharing work with a UK DS106-like class called Phonar. We were asked to pick 4 unused pieces of media and put them in Phonar’s dropbox. We aren’t allowed to link them, and we were asked to rename them so they were descriptive, so I have:

Church – This is a picture of a church downtown. I was going to use it for my DesignBlitz, but I took a better photo later on of the same building.
Green Bush – Is a picture of none other than….A GREEN BUSH! I thought I would be able to use it for a texture in my DesignBlitz, but I couldn’t really make much out of it, so it got nixed!
Shadows – I took a picture of the shadow me and my girlfriend made as we were walking downtown…I wasn’t going to use it for a project, but it happened to be in the same batch with my DesignBlitz!
VA Electric – This is a photo of an old building with writing on the wall. It was for TDC264…which I still completed, but I got a similar and closer picture. I think this one has more to work with.

And, as usual, The Daily Create:

TDC274 – eXtreme edit. This assignment was to take a normal photo and edit it to make it more eXtreme. I took a photo of me kayaking a couple of weeks ago and made it EXTREME!! First I turned myself into a cartoon. But that wasn’t enough so I went ahead and put on Neon Edge-detect…(Someone told me I looked like a mummy kayaking lol) and then I added a flare at the front of the kayak…I was attempting to make it look like it was special/I was going fast…take it as you will! And lastly, I added  a border to make it look more like a framed photo!

TDC277 – Non-dominant emotion! We were supposed to use our non-dominant hand (my left hand!) and draw a human emotion. Well…I started drawing an angry face…but I think I messed up on the mouth and the emotion couldn’t really be angry…SO, I improvised. I slapped on some horns, a goatee, and some sharp teeth. The result? A crazy angry-happy-looking devil

TDC278 – Take a picture of the first thing you do in the morning. That speaks for itself. EVERY TUESDAY AND THURSDAY(and some weekends) I have to wake up to an alarm that wants me to go to work…Why can’t I just stumble upon a large sum of money?

TDC281 – Fences and walls can divide or demarcate. Make a creative photo of a fence or wall today. This is a photo from William Street and is facing the UMW fence/wall. I actually edited this photo using Aviary. I had recently downloaded it and wanted to see what it was capable of. I settled on this nice black-white old-timey effect. It has some interesting features and I’ve been playing with some of my other photos that were previously on my phone.

TDC283 – Record a 30 second time capsule message to people 100 years in the future telling them one important thing. The video pretty much speaks for itself. I’m a big “momma’s boy”, so I figured I would remind the future how awesome moms are!

TDC284 – Take a photo of someone/something that means a lot to you. What is its story? This is my Mazda 6, aka Princess if you watched my Keychain Story. It means a lot to me because it is my first car. But I’m also proud because I didn’t have my parents spend a single cent to help me buy it, nor to help me fix it when it failed inspection (I did have my dad help me fix it once I bought the part though…he’s a smart dude) I bought it May 2011 after my first year of college. I figured I needed a vehicle to travel back and forth between home and school…which I do, but I use it more towards driving to the squad, work, and hanging out with friends! We’ve been to New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. So we’ve been to the mountains, to the Bay, and to the beach…And I’ve only had her for about a year! She’s my baby and that’s why I chose this as something that means a lot to me!

And of course, you can’t have Radio Week without a radio show, we had to create a group Radio Show! Our group was named Team RADtastic. And I must say, they were definitely a RAD group of people. Not only was the content of the project fun, but the people I worked with were simply awesome. I could not have asked for better people to work with, and this made a lot of work seem like a lot of fun! At first, I was unaware that the group had begun communicating using GoogleDocs and had already met once. I mentioned to @cogdog that I could not reach out to my group, but he solved that issue for me quickly! The the group of @dzim, @CrystalRose0784, @doodle_muse, and paul_walt responded to me and welcomed me with open arms. I had to catch up on what the group had discussed and what theme they chose to do. They picked the theme of “Zombie Apocalypse”, which I was all for because I think Zombies are awesome! Next, I think the easiest thing while working as a group, was well…working as a group! We were a group of individuals with different backgrounds who had this common ground about zombies, so we bounced ideas off of each other(like in the video we had to watch in the first couple of weeks!!) and came up with a cool radio show. Most of the time, you get stuck with people you don’t want to work with, or they slack off and let other people do the work. Not this group, we all contributed, worked well together, had fun doing so, and when the editing was happening, although only @dzim was working on it, we all were in Google Hangout providing insight and of course, moral support! The hardest part was actually being able to meet. We all had our separate lives and are involved with school, work, and family. So finding time to meet was the biggest pain. However, we managed to meet 3 times(well I met three times, they met 4 I think ) and every time we had fun, but still managed to get our work done. When we met, we all decided that we would play our own character in our story, and that each of us would create a bumper and a commercial to add into the show. We were also required as a different assignment to create a T-shirt/Poster design for the radio show. They were all fairly simple to complete, but they did take some time and I went outside of my comfort zone by editing with audio(which I’ve been doing all week woohoo!) and using/hearing my voice in all the audio we’ve been creating. For a show as a whole, I think with minor narration, you will understand what is happening and think it is interesting. Without the narration, I think at some parts listeners will be like, “What the heck is going on?”. As for being able to tell a story about a group of individuals who found a radio station during the zombie apocalypse, I think we brushed the tip of the iceberg of what could be an ongoing/weekly show. We compressed it into a full story in 35 minutes, but I could see a series of audio stories which would allow listeners to get a better understanding, but still packed full of awesomeness!

I’ve enjoyed working with audio for the past week. I liked in a lot more than I thought I would. Especially since Audacity was more user-friendly as audio editing than GIMP for image editing. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to create audio this week, I even attempt to avoid Audio/Video TDC! BUT not only did I succeed in the radio show and my weekly assignments, I also did an audio/video TDC this week! So I left my comfort zone and found that it wasn’t as harsh out there as I thought it was. I look forward to editing more audio and dedicating more time to each work to produce a really cool outcome.

ROB OUT! (Listen to the radio show )