I think that this project will be fun! I know it is going to take a lot of time and effort but what is something great that doesnât take time and effort. My character is actually based off of someone I know, and I am hoping they will help me get the correct voice I need in order to make my life just a tiny bit easier. My character is shy at first so maybe he wonât do a lot of talking in the beginning of the radio show but at the end he will be the one talking the most.
As for the âplotâ of the radio show I have no idea until I know which other characters I will be working with. Everyoneâs character has a different personality that we must take into account for when conversating with others. Like my character he likes boring items like water and soup. My character is a boring person but has a great personality once he starts opening up.
I am very excited to work with other people to make a radio show and I am hoping that we can do a zoom call, so I am able to meet my classmates face to face. Only time will tell me who I will be working with.
This week I had to do 3 assignments from the bank. The catcher was that the assignments were only suppose to come from AudioAssignments â Assignment Bank (ds106.us). They also had to contain some sort of course theme of AI or Dr. Oblivion in two out of three assignments. The two assignments that I chose are connected to Dr. Oblivion.
I found one assignment that is called Consult with your Doctor. The instruction are:
âIf you give Dr. Oblivion (https://oblivion.university/ ) a questions or directive, he will give a response of up to a minute, which may or may not be loaded with snark. For this assignment you should download MP3 of the Doctorâs response, import it into Audacity and cut it up and insert your part of the conversation, which doesnât necessarily have to match your original input. You may download a few MP3 responses from https://oblivion.univerty/ to get some personality variation. And you donât have to let him have the last word.â
I was so excited that I found this assignment because it relates to what I need to complete this week. I started by pulling up Dr. Oblivion and asking him a question having to do with what his office hours are. Which of course, he had a smart remark. If you want to hear my conversation with him about his office hours you can listen to it here:
To get my responses was actually kind of difficult. I had no idea where to star using my own voice because I was not taught in my 30 min intro at the DKC. I ended up using an app on my iPhone called âVoice Memosâ Once I got my different responses to Dr. Oblivion, I saved it and sent it through my email. From my email I downloaded it and then of course, Audacity did not accept that format. I then went on google and asked to convert the audio to WAV. This website: Â MP3 to WAV Converter online – FreeConvert.com saved me multiple times during this week. I was then able to cut and paste the âconversationâ with Dr. Oblivion. I think it turned out great in my opinion as this is my first time doing anything close to this.
I would give this assignment an 8 out of 10. 1 being the easiest and 10 being the hardest. The reason it was so difficult for me was because I had to find a voice recording app and then I had to convert it into WAV. After that, the cutting and pasting was not necessarily hard but very time consuming.
The other assignment that had Dr. Oblivion in it was a tongue twister. To find a tongue twister, I opened up google and I was giving Tongue Twisters Generator (randomwordgenerator.com) I clicked through a couple of them until I found one that was a little bit silly. I wanted people to laugh at the tongue twister. But the more I tried to make this assignment sound good, the worst it sounded like. The instructions you are probably wondering about are:
âSay any tongue twister as fast as you can and include a background sound to layer it.â
It sounds like such an easy task! But it because more and more difficult because first I had to hear myself talk and then go as fast as I could. I would say that I set myself up for failure! I finally got myself to say the tongue twister as fast as I could like times and by the fifth time, I gave up and I put it into audacity. Then I needed a background sound which I found on  Freesound. Putting my voice along with a sound is not as good as it sounds. I had to make the music quiet because I could barley hear myself talk. If you are looking for a good laugh and disappointment, you can hear this audio here:
I would give this assignment an 8 out of 10. 1 being the easiest and 10 being the hardest. The reason it is so high in the rankings was because I had to use my own voice and there were people around me and it just sounds horrible.
So that leaves one assignment, one that is not related to a course through AI or Dr. Oblivion. Of course, I picked this next assignment dealing with instruments. I always grew up with my mom always playing different kinds of instruments so I was excited to see this assignment. The instructions are shown below:
âUsing a Free Notation software (such as musescore) Create a piece of music using 3 instruments. The piece can be as long or as short as you would like, in any style but it must have 3 separate and distinct instruments.â
In my masterpiece, I used the sounds of a Kalimba, handpan and, a guitar. I had so much fun looking and hearing many different sounds you can get from these instruments. The reason I chose these is because my sister has a Kalimba, my mom has a handpan, and I always wanted to learn how to play the guitar. To hear the song, I made you can click the play button.
The sounds I got to create this was also from Freesound.
I would give this a 3 out of 10 for the challenge of this assignment because I found it fun to create but also it was hard trying to find the instrument that had a similar tone so I could match it with another instrument. The guitar sound I chose was a different sound than just strumming so that way it could somewhat go along with the other instruments I chose.
âTell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least Five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds.â
I pondered on this assignment for about a day just listening to the sounds around me. Than the next morning, I had an idea.
This idea came to me when I was feeding the cats this morning and I heard the can open. I thought this was the best idea I could have came up with. Â I used five different sounds to create one masterpiece. All of the sounds I used came from Freesound. I was struggling to find the last sound I needed to have five different ones and then I thought about the bowl I place on the ground and how that makes a sound!
My lovely creation:
Overall, I would give this assignment a 6 out of 10. 1 being easy and 10 being hard. I say this because finding the sounds was easy, but this was my first assignment I needed to overlap the sounds to get right tempo. It was a lot of clicking buttons and a lot of replaying the audio. We did great in the end; I like to think. For some reason the eating and drinking sound similar but if you listen closing, you can hear the cat swallow the water at the end of the audio.
Then his voice starts to fade as the beginning of the next song starts up.
I got this image in my head of what I wanted it to sound like and making a thought in your head was a little bit more challenging than I would have thought. I knew that I wanted the music to fade in, have Dr. Oblivion talk, then fade into another song. It was pretty easy to set up once I got it into Audacity. Overall, I would give it a 3 out of 10. 1 being easy and 10 being hard.
During this week we had to watch two “starter” videos to make us start thinking about the radio and storytelling. During the first video:
I like how he was able to use words to create a picture into my head. He states that with radio they have to use co imaging to create the full experience. Connecting from this radio because one person has the voice and the other one or ones have the paint brush. The voice has many different styles like deep, high pitched, that voice than kind of leads off in sort of a question. He believes that radio will never die. I agree with everything he has to say throughout this video especially how the radio will never die.
The other video we had to watch was:
He states that a job as a storyteller is to make sure to create a circle of connections. The âgoodâ story is in a kind of dream state which everyone wants to go or hear about. Now a days we have so many layers and weird noises. Abumrad mentions that the storytelling is from a very long time ago where it is ancient.
This week was by far my favorite! At the beginning of the week, I created a meeting at the Digital Knowledge Center â Empowering UMW students to be digital creators to completely understand WordPress. It was very helpful and now all my pages and post are sorted. I feel so relieved that things are starting to come together so nicely. There were about four pages/ posts that I had to create this week.
Chip Kidd was a very interesting person to learn about during this week. There were many interesting videos and articles that I read which talked about design. Chip Kidd is a very important person to the design world of book covers. Book covers are a great way to making the reader have first impression of the words they are about to read.
This assignment was a whirl wind inside of my home. I was rushing around knocking over items and trying to take the “perfect” picture. What assignment might you be asking yourself right now. Well photoblitzer (johnjohnston.info) had a great idea to make up 7 different items we had to capture. Randomly. The 7 random tasks I got were:
Share a picture showing you doing a “pay it forward” good deed.
Make an image that represents hope.
Pink is HOT! Make a photo dominated by something PINK.
They’re all around. Make a photograph of a wheel near you.
Take a picture of fire or something that represents fire.
Make a photograph of the front of a building.
Make a photo that freezes or isolates the motion of an object.
While making these 7 photos I had to complete them within a time frame of 20 minutes
“Make an image that represents hope.” The first picture I took was of my sister’s tattoo of a semi-colon. She self-designed the tattoo and our mom and her got matching ones to give them hope that things will start to get better.
“Pink is HOT! Make a photo dominated by something PINK.” I chose this picture because it was the only thing I actually have that is all pink.
“They’re all around. Make a photograph of a wheel near you.” The first thing I could think of that was a wheel was a tire.
“Make a photograph of the front of a building.” I live in my house so might has well take a picture of it.
“Share a picture showing you doing a “pay it forward” good deed.” Giving a penny to a friend to help her buy items.
“Take a picture of fire or something that represents fire.” This is a diffuser that looks like a fire when it is on.
Make a photo that freezes or isolates the motion of an object. My Cat jumping off my dresser.
However, I thought the Stablediffusionweb was going to do better:
Boy was I wrong! It is crazy how even though using the same phrase, but a different AI generator website would change a picture so much! As you can now see both websites got the close up and the ice cream but, Craiyon did a way better job of showcasing Rod Wave.
I think the longest part about this was trying to find an assignment I thought was interesting. When I stumbled on this assignment, I fell in love with it because I always take up close pictures of items around the shop. I immediately took a picture of (can you guess it). I was already working on it so why not get a nice close-up picture of it.
Take a close up picture of something as see if people can guess what it is. Try doing the skin or outside of something that would make it hard for someone to guess!
It can break many body parts if controlled a certain way.
My wife said I needed to clean out my bag and then I found this assignment so might as well do this one because everything is already out of the bag. This is the bag I take anywhere with me even if it is just to the movies.
Your purse, bag, packpack, murse, whatever, is your constant companion throughout your adult life. What are the essentials in your bag that get you through the day? Take a picture of the items and detail each of them with a description.
The reason I clicked on this assignment was because I remember when I was litter, a movie was about to play in the theater. The move that I waited so long for finally came out was titled Big Eyes (2014) – IMDb. I was not disappointed in this move. This assignment pulled me in because I feel like eyes are an opening into the soul. It intrigues me that everyone looks at the world differently through their own eyes. To make the look as though I have big eyes, I used an app called photoshop I got my phone.
The easy part was downloading the app on my phone. Now was the hard part, picking a photo that did not show all of my face. I had fond this one which was taken on November 12th, 2023. The button that I use to make only the eyes bigger was called “reshape”. I then started moving around my finger on my eye in a circle and it started making my eyes bigger. It was easy once I got the hang of that particular tool on the app.
In this Assignment they wanted me to create a movie poster that has a different feeling than the plot of the story line.
“Create a poster or ad for an upcoming movie. Let the adâs theme and movie contradict themselves. For instance, you can have your movie be about kids playing on a Summer day, but your ad shows a spooky side to the plot. A good âeverything is not what it seemsâ kicker. Your movie could be an action packed movie called âFight Itâ, but in your ad you can show everyone laughing as if it is a comedy. There are many ways you can mashup this assignment. Make it your own!”
My plot would be than an Artificial Intelligence bartender made all of our drinks. While handing us all our drinks one at a time the bartender would have a creepy smile to the person who got their drink last. Kelsey unfortunately got her drink last, with a creep smile and a tilted head, the bartender states that one sip will do it. Kelsey was so weirded out that the friend group decided they would play drink roulette.
While playing roulette Kelsey still ended up with the “special drink.” While they were all sipping their drinks, Kelsey started feeling weird. A feeling that she has never felt before. She started singing out of nowhere while she was stumbling all of the place. Kelsey was drunk. Yes, the AI bartender did slip something into the drink, but it was nothing to kill her but for her to join life. Whether the Artificial Intelligence messed up on purpose or maybe the computer system within got messed with will always be unknown. However, instead of the movie poster/Ad being dark and or scary, the movie is light airy and filled with a bunch of singing.
Photoshop came in handing again for making a movie poster. I clicked on a picture I took a while back ago and started immediately on the job. I clicked on the button that states “text”. My brain started to power on and my fingers were trying to keep up. I settled on this title because one of my friends actually got acholic drinks while my other two friends got regular drinks so there is one drink that is darker than the others. I was a fun assignment to do because it brought me back to a good moment in my life. When I took this picture it was during Enchant Christmas – Enchant.
I am missing the candle I saw at Target! I have decided to put up a missing sign for this candle that looks like a skull. The assignment said to do a person or a character but what is fun about making a missing poster with people. So many missing posters are for animals, humans, and characters but you do not see a missing poster for a candle!
“Create a missing posters flyer for a fictional movie/show character, made-up person, animal, or a real person. Be sure to include a picture, the name, characteristics, and last seen date and place. Let your imagination do the talking for this poster!”
To make this poster I used a temple from google 41 Printable Missing Poster Templates (Flyers & Signs) (templatelab.com) I downloaded with just a couple of clicks of my mouse. I then opened up word and started to fill out the template with my own information. It was easy to fill out until I had to upload a picture into the spot. The picture I had taken, was very large so I had to make it fit into the box within the template.
While doing this project I started getting curious about the candle and I tried looking it up on Target.com but nothing showed for it. That is when I made a google search for the picture I took and BAM! there it was on Ebay 38oz XL Ceramic Skull Figural Candle Black – Threshold | eBay I am thinking about getting it now that I have found another one.
