This week, my radio show group, The Fifth Dimension, was assigned to listen and evaluate Team Awesome’s show, “Blast from the Past/Into the Future“.  Our grading criteria included the following:

~Quality of audio sound

~Quality of audio editing

~Use of sound effects

~Use of music

~Structure/cohesiveness

~Storytelling effectiveness/Draw in listener

Team Awesome mixed the two ideas of the future and the past, which made for a more interesting listen!  The back and forth between the two timelines was easy to follow and kept me wondering what the other character was up to.

Although the idea was very creative, in the beginning of the show, when the plot is being lain out, the audio quality wasn’t the greatest. It had a weird resonance in my speakers, but the volume was perfect!  I liked the cleverness of creating a different “person” by adjusting the pitches of the narrator and man, but they were both hard to hear at times and I had to rewind a lot to make sure I heard everything. There also seemed to be some white noise in the background throughout the whole show.

I wasn’t too keen on the music that was played in the background in the throughout the show.  I think having a future and past theme, there could have been a lot more use of futuristic and old, classic music when in the relative times.  Also, the only time sound effects were really used was in commercials.  I think they could have taken a lot more advantage of some great sound effects from the future or the 50s.

As I mentioned earlier, I liked the back and forth structure of the show between the two characters, but it was hard to tell when a commercial or bumper came on because it all sounded so similar.  Different music or maybe something like “And now, a word from our sponsors” could have warned the listener that a break was coming up.

Although the plot drew me in, the way it was portrayed did not. It was pretty obvious that a script was being used the whole time and there was some word fumbling which could have been avoided by re-recording.  When someone fumbled over their words, it got distracting and pulled me out of their imaginary world.

Overall, I would give Team Awesome’s show 3/5 stars.