Author Archives: ds106 site

Week 13 Summary

Communication is such an important part of groupwork. Unfortunately, one of our group members left this week, so we have decided to pivot the direction of our project. It’s looking more like it’ll be a music video/animated music video following our characters and a storyline. I will be doing a lot of editing this week. Earlier, I posted a Progress Update, but that was before things changed. I think everything will work out if we plan accordingly!

Progress Update

My group has meet up to discuss writing a script and characters and how we will translate the story into the project. We are currently bouncing ideas off each other and will refine them and meet again this week.

Week 12 Summary

Girl, this week has been too much. I had an event reschedule, ended up with three group projects, was double booked whenever I had things to do, and had people have to bail on meeting up with me. If you’re interested in listening to Mozart’s Requiem, I’m singing the entire thing on Sunday. I need to make my therapy appointments more frequent. Anyway, as per usual, I did three daily creates:

Daily create 4835, daily create 4836, and daily create 4837.

I also worked with my group to make the movie trailer this week!

Final Project Trailer

We had a zoom meeting to discuss our ideas for the project, and I decided to edit everything together with a (unknown to me at the time) double booked schedule. I don’t know why I did this, but we have a solid head start for the final project. My group members and I found stock images, video, music, sound effects, and took some pictures ourselves. We put everything together in a google drive folder and I edited it in OpenShot Video Editor. I put all the files together at specific times, making some images last longer or shorter, making sure everything fits in with the music, and trimming some audio and video to make everything fit. We wanted the trailer to be like an introduction to our characters, which would be expanded upon in the final project. To be honest I probably should’ve used Krita and CapCut and OpenShot Video Editor, but hey, we’ve got two weeks to work on that. We plan on writing out a script for the final project in our next zoom meeting. I very much appreciate that my group members found or made files for their characters/stories and sent them to me, because that would’ve been a bit of a nightmare to figure out. Thank you to listening to my ramblings, I’ll see you next week.

Week 11 Summary

We had a lighter week this week and got to listen to some radio shows. I was only able to listen on Wednesday because of night classes, and I actually skipped part of a club meeting for it, but I enjoyed getting to talk about the process. I completed my Radio Show Review about The Opposites Show today, though I had been working on it since Wednesday. I also completed three daily creates this week.

Daily create 4827, daily create 4829, daily create 4830

See you next post!

Radio Show Review

I listened to The Opposites Show on Wednesday night on the ds106 radio. I thought the ads were really good, finding myself tuning them out sometimes because I was mistaking them for the real thing. I also liked how the same transitional tune was used throughout to let us know what was going on. The different group members having conversations with each other and with AI was a good way of telling the story. One part that particularly interested me was the warning/alert that got cut off as the radio accepted the returning caller. It added a lot of mystery that I don’t think we’ll get the answers to anytime soon. A critique I have for the show is most of the ads were played in the beginning before tuning in to the show, which makes sense because we have ad segments, but I think it would’ve been better if one ad played in the beginning, probably the one introducing us to the AI algorithmic dating app, and other ads were strategically scattered throughout. Overall, I thought the radio show had good formatting and was fun to listen to!

As for our radio show, Noir News, when I heard it Wednesday night, that was the first time I had heard it in full and not in pieces. Despite having different characters and stories, we were still able to connect them by making news segments from the location where our characters live. For example, I decided to make my news segment from Chicago in about 100 years in the future. This is around the time my character is active in the story. My group member Maddie took all of our sound files and edited them together into one radio show. I appreciated the feedback we got on our show, and I’ve thought of a few ways it could be improved, such as audio mixing or saving the files differently to make things easier to put together. My group is working together again for the final project, so I hope we can continue to make things bigger and better than before.

Week 10 Summary

Oh my goodness we finally made it! Don’t get me wrong, it was fun to think about what the news might look like in a futuristic cyberpunk world, but that was stressful. My groupmates were done with their sections of the radio show by about Wednesday, and I was panicking and scrambling to keep up with them. I hope I gave them enough time for editing. I think it’ll end up nice and I’m glad I worked with them. I made two daily creates this week and my portion of the radio show. I wrote it and recorded and edited it on Audacity, merging it with my intro. The entire script was spoken in one take, and errors were edited out.

Daily create 4819, and daily create 4920

And here is my pride and joy, along with its transcript. (keep in mind the transcript was originally written for me, so there may be grammar errors)

Introduction: Welcome to ds106 radio in Chicago. We have headlines, alerts, and forecast. Now back to your host for the weather, and as always, thank you for listening.

Transcript: It’s 8 am in Chicago today and roughly 10 sol for any listeners from the Mars colony. It looks like a sunny day today, only thing obstructing the sun right now being the smog, which is predicted to dissipate starting at roughly 12 pm today as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is powering on their atmospheric filtration systems they’ve set up all around the city. As a reminder, the national oceanic and atmospheric administration has issued the following warning: Please refrain from touching, moving, or attempting to enter the atmospheric filtration systems. Do not stand within 15 feet of any filtration device while active, especially if you are pregnant, elderly, or with small children. The mayor wishes to remind everyone that until the atmospheric filtration systems have been deactivated, no one is allowed on the roof of any building in the city of Chicago. The high for today will be a warm 68 degrees with a low of 51, another record breaker for this week. Our current Air Quality Index is up to 113 today, so respirators are not needed for outside activity. And do keep in mind this number is expected to go down in coming the hours after the filtration systems are activated.

Coming up next, police are investigating recent reports of robots traversing through abandoned subway tunnels. This behavior is considered emergent, as there has not been any evidence to suggest that the robots are communicating or have communicated with people about this. Emergent behavior in machines is when they act in a new way outside of their programming. This has become much more common since the singularity, leading scientists to believe robots are capable of much more than they let on. As for travelling underground, computer engineers believe this strange behavior may involve their pathfinding software, with one stating, “They may have made a calculation that using the old tunnels is faster than walking through crowds, so they may be testing that hypothesis.” It is of note that robots are typically spotted going underground in pairs, and this is not thought to be a dangerous behavior at this time. Even still, the police recommend that you do not follow them, as the tunnels are dangerous and cave ins could occur at any moment.

Now, as a follow up for the previous story from last week when a local high school was under an active shooter alert. The armed assailants who took the hostages did release the victims unharmed, but have yet to be found themselves. The current suspects are believed to attend this high school and will be tried as adults. The motivation for this crime is still unknown, and it is unknown if the hostages had any relation to the perpetrators. The police are still on a manhunt for the two suspects, and have taken potential accomplices in for questioning. This case is unusual because of the EMP attack, which prevented the recording of any evidence as the crime took place. Police Chief Owen Andrews stated, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had to rely on witness testimony, but we will get to the bottom of this and bring justice to the victims and their families.”

And last up on our list is a heartwarming story. ‘A cuddly pile of kittens are saved’! An anonymous donation of one million dollars to the One Tail At A Time adoption center has prevented the destruction of the East Wing, where stray cats are housed. Recently, the adoption center had put up statements on their website about financials, and the very real possibility that they would have to tear down or close off the east wing. Thanks to this kind soul, who is rumored to be singer and songwriter Casanova, One Tail at a Time will continue to rescue and house stray cats and rehabilitate them before putting them up for adoption. Staff hopes this mysterious donor steps forward so they can be thanked in person.

Week 9 Summary

If you saw this assignment posted late, no you didn’t. I got sick and prioritized my computer science work (my major). Even still, I think I made some banger assignments this week. For example:

Daily create 4814, daily create 4815, and daily create 4816.

And now for the main event,

Radio Commercial

Radio Show Logo

Radio Show Intro Featuring Zer0

I enjoyed creating some of these, despite the stress of the week. Hopefully things will settle down more and hopefully my groupmates and I make an awesome radio show that we are proud of.

Radio Show Intro Featuring Zer0

Radio Intro Assignment for Week 9

In all honesty, I don’t even know what a radio intro is, though I tried looking up some examples on YouTube. I collected some free to use audio from Pixabay, made by ByronatorAustralia and Ivan_Luzan. I tried editing them together with other music in Audacity, before messing it up and starting over in OpenShot video editor. I cut the audios and merged them together while adjusting volume for speech. As for the words, I wrote them in a text-to-speech software called Replica Studios. I tried to give my character a voice and found one with a robotic filter. I had it read out the lines separately so I could place them wherever I wanted.

Transcription: “Welcome to ds106 radio in Chicago. We have headlines, alerts, and forecast. Now, back to your host for the weather. And as always, thank you for listening.”

Radio Show Logo

Radio Show Design Assignment for Week 9

This is a logo I designed for the radio show group project based on the Apple Weather App logo. Our radio show is news based and will have a focus on weather. I used the art program Krita to draw it, using many built in tools to achieve what I wanted. I used a watercolor brush to make the background (my original idea was to make stormy clouds) but then I darkened it with a filter and added the cloud and sun with the neon effect to incorporate tech into the logo. A friend of mine helped me to create the neon effect and I ended up using six layers total on neon alone.