So I don’t think anyone would be surprised to find out that I chose the “Being A Music Producer” audio assignment. The objective of this assignment was to record two parts of an audio track with any instrument (obviously guitar for me!). To begin with, I laid down a rhythm backing track. This was actually […]

I think I got a little morbid here with my audio story…but oh well! I went on and when I went into the sound effects section, the first thing I saw was a traffic sound effect. So I put together a little mashup with 4 other sounds to create a car crash on the highway. […]

So for my foray into SoundCloud, I figured I’d try to find the most absurd news headline of the year and read it aloud as a news announcer. Here’s the link to the actual article, and you can hear me reading the headline on SoundCloud:

For one of the video assignments, I thought it would be fun to complete Where are they now? “Don’t you hate how some movies just leave you hanging!! Do you ever wonder what happens to the characters next? Well this … Continue reading →

For this assignment, you are supposed to provide play by play commentary on a video. I thought to mix it up a bit and do something a little different, so I found a video on “how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” since it’s one of my favorite foods ;) and add a […]

For this assignment, I chose a clip from Pearl Harbor titled “We Got a Large Haze“: I have seen this movie multiple times and in 2012, I had the privilege of visiting the World War II Valor in the Pacific … Continue reading →

This was my first video creation/editing experience! I learned a lot from this assignment and it was cool to see how easy it can be to add in things like a title and credits. The trickiest part for me was adding in the overlay audio, but I ended up using Audacity to create the “layered” […]

All this talk of film editing made me think of Martin Scorcese and his long-time partnership with film editor Thelma Schoonmaker.  I would venture to say that Scorcese is a master director and storyteller, so chances are Schoonmaker isn’t a bad film editor either.   One of my favorite Scorcese films is Casino, so off I […]

On the surface, I agree with Roger Ebert’s idea of a film’s composition.  It is my sense that we as humans have a natural tendency for symmetry and balance.  We may not notice when something “works” but we probably do when it doesn’t.  It was difficult for me to think of this in the abstract […]

I had to figure out what was a good story to tell for the combining sounds assignment. This was not …

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My main takeaway this week: working with sound is not as difficult as I thought, but still the most challenging I have found of the differing editing tasks we have done in this course.  I do feel completely at ease in recording, exporting, importing, and loading to SoundCloud, but the editing portion (splicing, fading, etc.) […]

I think I may have found my final project story this week, based upon comments alone.  The comments on my Public Health story idea seemed to coalesce around the idea of a public health super hero-type character- I really appreciated the different layers the commenters added to my original thoughts. I also learned via comments […]

Last week while trying to complete my assignment I downloaded malicious code to my work laptop. I have always been …

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Trolling Craigslist is always fun, so the first audio assignment listed on Week 5′s page immediately jumped out at me.  Off I went to the local Craiglist “free” section and found this lovely post: Sounds strange enough to me!!  Why anyone would want to take on such an awful job for “free cactus” is beyond […]

There is a saying that behind every good man is a good woman. This week, I learned that behind every good director is a good film editor. Truth be told, I had never really thought much of moving angles. This might be because my favorite films are rom coms. So, reading Roger Ebert’s How to […]

All story is manipulation… -from Ken Burns:On Story I admit that I’ve never really thought much of cinematic techniques in play when watching movies, nor how much I have been manipulated into liking a movie through these techniques (e.g., such … Continue reading →

In this assignment we are to analyze a movie scene in three ways; Without volume, without picture, then as normal. I chose the movie, Gladiator, not only because I LOVE this movie, but also since I remember it having some awesome cinematography and this would be my chance to break one of the scenes down. […]

Roger Ebert, a well-known film critic, wrote about his experiences studying, dissecting, and reviewing films. He explains that conducting these actions are much more than an exercise he goes through, its the fact that he essentially “reads” the movie by using a technique called “Cinema Interruptus” -  stopping the film when something stands out or […]

This was a special religious day for the entire family as we got to fellowship and eat what some may …

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A little late to the summary party this week but here it is! This week’s GMU DS106 class dove into the use of audio in storytelling and allowed us to get our hands dirty with some practical experience editing our own … Continue reading →

For :30 this week, I had the distinct privilege of being a Foley Artist. As part of my DS106 assignment, I had to create :30 worth of Foley audio to go along with this Charlie Chaplin clip: I was responsible for … Continue reading →

I was thinking if there were any work-related things I could pull into for a story idea this week.  I work with a lot of people in the field of public health.  You may be asking yourself “What is public health?”  Sounds kind of crunchy and idealistic, huh?  Well it can be those things, but […]

Last week I was on a call about a tool that some colleagues and I are developing.  Basically, it’s something that we want everyone in our organization to be able to use to identify client problems and match them to solutions. … Continue reading →

Oy. Audio editing really scares me.  Which is probably (definitely) a large part of why all these assignments are late this week.  But I digress. For the sound effects story, I started to think of what I needed:  a scenario that didn’t need dialogue and a scenario that was “noisy” or had noises that were […]

This weekly summary should be titled, “The Sound of Silence,” or at least the second half of the week. This week started more auspiciously than it ended, I am sad to admit.  I created a SoundCloud account and posted my … Continue reading →

For my second audio assignment this week, I completed Taking Back Spam from the Audio Assignment Bank.  The sources I used to search for SPAM mail were my personal e-mail accounts; however, I soon found that I did not have very … Continue reading →

This week we dove in to the world of sound storytelling.  We explored different audio storytelling tools like SoundCloud.com, Audacity.com, and various sound banks and conversions tools to make different sound stories work and flow seamlessly together. I started off by connecting my love of Baseball by trying my hand at reenacting an entertaining and age-old Abbott and […]

I saw an article on NPR’s website that looked at the history of McDonald’s commercials targeting black American and the shift from “Makin’ it” to “Lovin’ it” over the past few decades.  Within the article, there are several video clips that encompass an entire narrative arc for a character named “Calvin.”  The ads span from 1990 […]

I constantly feel like I’m being overwhelmed by noise that begins with my alarm clock (that goes off way too early in the morning) and ends with email alerts coming from my laptop (as my India team gets working as I’m heading to bed). This week, we learned all about sound and the profound impact […]

You would think each week has me in a new city and that would be true the last two weeks. This week I was in Chicago for work and needed to do my assignments while in either a hotel room or a friend’s house. So that was an adventure but I was up for it! […]