I still haven’t decided whether I like radio or not, that being from the perspective of the broadcaster/writer, not listener.  Over the past few weeks I have been working with a couple class mates on a project to produce a 30 minute radio show/ radio segment with a consistent over arching theme.  My overall opinion of this project is that it went “ok” and I feel strongly that it is something that we could get better and better at each time.  I also feel that it is one of those projects that seems like it would be very simple from the beginnning only to later discover it really isn’t.  Initially we had to get over the hump of coming up with a show idea/theme.  I had a good feeling that a lot of people would somehow incorporate vampires or zombies so I suggested aliens.  I wanted to have a show that exhibited a theme that, however outlandish, could be relevant and allegorical with respect to issues we face today.  The few issues touched on were immigration, tolerance and occupation.  Our first segment was bascially a new excerpt in which we took a curent article related to problems involving Muslim immigration in Europe and altered it to reflect Space Aliens in the future as opposed to Muslims in current times.  This first segment turned out to be very very dry.  In the context of the whole show I felt it went along really well though.  For the remainder of the show we wrote out an outline of segments that would be representative of a typical radio show applied to our theme and divided up the parts for writing.  From here on out everything went very smoothly.  On the audio recording side we completely relied on one of our group members, Clifton, who had all the equipment and skills necessary.  Like I said overall I was pretty pleased with the show in regards to content and structure and was most pleased with the execution of the theme.  I feel like our performance execution was our area needing improvement though, simply becasuse it being our first time.  As writing and recording progressed things seemed to go smoother and smoother and everyone began to get more and more comfortable with the mic.

This weekend shows of our classsmates were broadcast on ds106 radio.  I initially began listening around 6:00 pm and was only able to catch about 5 -10 minutes of “Mysteriously Mysterious Mysteries.”  I think the problem was on my end – I was in my jeep trying to stream through my iphone and I kept losing the stream intermittently.  When I got home I was able to catch “Decades Radio” and what was either “This Talon Believes” or “The Lounge with Herman Gray.”  From what I heard there were several good ideas in the programming themes.  I thought the fake interview with Sarah Palin soundclips was pretty funny and Decades Radio seemed to have a good flow to it.  One of the shows from what I understood was just simply re-telling Dr. Seuss stories.  I think we all agree that with this experience the next time will definitely be much easier.  The comfort level is there now and so is the conceptual understanding of what good programming is.  I think having direction is very very important for the audience.  Expectations are one thing but having direction is another.