Create a 30-45 second radio commercial for a product from the 80’s. Add in some background music and/or sound effects to make it sound like a real radio commercial.
For this assignment, I decided to venture into the realm of nonsense to come up with the most bizarre ad I could think of. Meet the Jetpack Jammies.
After painstakingly putting that vague vision into words, I used Voicemaker to create the narrator’s voice. I then used Audacity to create the old-timey radio effect on the voice and to speed up the disclaimer.
I got my music and the jetpack sound here. I used the same radio effect on both. Finally, I used Lexica to make the weird image you see now.
For my first audio assignment this week, I choose to do the Good Morning Message for The Village. I of course had a lot of fun making more ominous brainwashing content for this company and I hope other people do too!
It is always such a wonderful thing to hear a bright cheery voice delivering the Good Morning Message in The Village. Why don’t you bring some joy to the day and to your fellow Residents by creating and recording a wonderful message of community and cheer. Share your audio via Soundcloud and tag it appropriately.
Making this assignment was pretty simple since we’ve had time to get used to the various tools available.
First I used this text-to-speech tool to generate that cheery voice I knew this message needed. I then found that classic morning I needed music here. After getting both of those I did some quick editing using DaVinci Resolve’s Fairlight. And I know that that tool is generally used for far more complicated projects but I had been using it so much recently that it was where my cursor led me.
Finally, at the end of this assignment when I was about to upload it to SoundCloud, I felt that it was missing a photo for that final touch. So I generated one on Lexica and then edited the text on Photopea.
“Create a 30-45 second radio commercial for a product from the 80’s. Add in some background music and/or sound effects to make it sound like a real radio commercial.“
I made a commercial fitting for my character, Hwei. He is attempting to sell AI powered prosthetic body augments with the promise of alleviating pain and enhancing performance. I think something like this is how Hwei would first introduce his inventions to the market, but not necessarily for monetary gain. This type of advertisement, if successful, would slowly introduce his inventions to society, and eventually making all of society accustom to getting this procedure done.
Most of the lines I chose were not sales tactics that you’d normally see in advertisements other than the intro that poses a question and then a solution. That is what makes Hwei’s commercial unique; no upselling, no monetary value mentioned. This also definitely isn’t from the 80’s but I took Professor Bond’s offer of bending assignments to meet our show, so I just did a regular commercial for this.
"Make a sick beat, using whatever you can find on freesounds.org, and whatever you can record around you! I don’t care how long it is, just get groovy dood."
I bent this audio assignment a little bit to meet our needs for the podcast. I decided to go on freesound.org to find a suitable introduction song to our podcast. Actually, as we’re still in the process of splicing things together and deciding on which audio files would work for each scenario, I think that this may end up being a transition of some sort. There are a few other audio clips from the website that we have in mind but we won’t know for sure which ones to use until the rest of our show is structured.
I think this sound in particular has a very tech-y sound signature to it, and it’s almost stereotypically high tech with the synths and chords that go into it. We’ll see where this goes in our show, but I’m glad to have one piece of audio that would suit many aspects of our show.
Today, I worked on a radio bumper for our radio show!
This might be the first time I’ve ever heard Dr. Oblivion sound a little enthusiastic! (I put the same prompt in over and over until he didn’t sound dead inside)
I use the CC Search and looked up “futuristic,” originally for inspiration, but then I found this which linked me to a Freesound audio that I ended up liking enough to use! It’s the only music I used, and I only really fiddled with fading in and fading out at the start, start of Oblivion’s message, end of Oblivion’s message, and the end of the bumper.
The only other thing I did was talk to Dr. Oblivion and convince him to give me a radio bumper and end it with the familiar phrase “ds106 for life!” This took a while, because sometimes he told me he couldn’t do it, other times he would, and other times he’d just spit out something that wasn’t quite what I wanted. I ended up using two different responses he had, both where I had to tweak a little to get the sort of message or tone that I wanted.
I put everything together in Audacity. It was pretty simple, but I wish I could get rid of the slight background noise for Dr. Oblivion. I also wish I could just make him speak with a little emotion . . . but I know, he’s literally an AI, of course he’s not gonna be full of emotion.
Not sure what else to add for this, but it’s what I’ve made!
“Each year since 2017 Vanity Fair interviews Billie Eilish, and in many ways it is an introspective in which she is talking to her former self as the years go on. I hope when you’re reading this they are still doing them! But now it’s your turn. The first part is easy, make a list of questions you want to aks yourself, turn on the camera and hit record. A year from now, take the same questions and record yourself answering them again. Feel free to edit in responses from the previous year and even reactions to those previous answers. As the years go on perhaps you’ll learn more about yourself and who you are becoming.”
Here is the link!
This was actually fairly simple. I took questions from the 2022 Billie Eilish Vanity Fair interview (oddly, the 2023 one is not out . . . so maybe they’re done?) for myself and asked myself the questions. Well, most of the questions. I skipped the ones revolving around fans or about being an artist because I have zero fans and I am not an artist nor am I famous.
Filming was easy, I just filmed it on my iPhone 15 Pro camera and edited it using iMovie. I don’t think I ran into any errors in this or any trouble, it was fairly easy after having practiced using video editors for the class!
This was actually more like a reflection for me, and it kind of forced my to uncover things about myself that I wasn’t aware of our hadn’t voiced. I hadn’t really understood that I put so much work on myself just to escape overthinking thoughts until I, well, thought about it, and this made me think about it.
Obviously, I can’t fast travel and show you 2025’s interview of me, but I’m excited to see where I’ll be then, and I hope 2025 me will feel like I’ve come a long way.
For one of my assignments that needed to include my course character, I decided to make this Fake Propaganda Video
Smash up any combination of videos, still images, and audio to create a fake propaganda video. It can be comedic or (non-offensively, of course) serious, its up to you. Possibilities include: advertising a product, creating a villain, or selling a revolution.
In one of the episodes of the last season os Seinfeld, one of the main characters is advised to repeat “serenity now” as a mantra to ease his high blood pressure. Rather than repeat the phrase in a calm and controlled manner in a way that might help, Frank Costanza yells “SERENITY NOW!” at the top of his lungs whenever he feels stressed, thus defeating the purpose of the mantra.
I decided to create a visual piece of video and audio that would correct Frank’s mistake, and attempt to actually create one of those “serenity videos” that are often seen being played at dentist’s offices, or a spa. As an added twist, I loosely based this assignment on the “10 minute video challenge” meme in which a repeated looping of audio or video is played non-stop for 10 minutes. While it’s usually done for comic effect, I stretched the video out, repeating three 50 second nature clips over the course of the 10 minutes.
Tell your character’s story or a story from their life through video. This can be as simple as adding images and putting a voiceover, or recording a bit from your character’s life. Use MovieMaker or iMovie to put together the video and throw in some sound effects if you’d like. It is up to you!
Today I did a little combination of two Video Assignments: this one revolving around making an animatic and this one revolving around making a video list of 5 things important to you. Combining them, I chose to make a little animatic about things that are most important to my Course Character, Sol!
Actually, I was planning on making an animatic of the original assignment (conversing with Dr. Oblivion), but I was annoying having to keep drawing over and over. Instead, I used the frames I got from that and put them into this!
Here is the video:
I used FireAlpaca, an art program I’ve been using since like 2015 and a really old Wacom art tablet from when I used to actually draw a lot. Since then, I lost interest in art (I watched all my artist peers get better at art and watched how I could not always improve and it made me mad so I just stopped (and I got old and busy)), but this was nice to rebirth the artsy side of me.
I used ElevenLabs for the AI voice for Sol (it’s the voice Serena), but I don’t think the voice is exactly what I would imagine them to sound like. Having a fluid form makes me think that their voice would just be different all the time.
I used OpenShot to edit this and finally figured out how to work it, and it is actually . . . so easy to use, it’s kind of crazy. Not sure what happened last week, but we got it! Putting all the pictures in and moving them around was not hard at all, very simple task and not even the hardest part. Very crazy to me that I’m saying that the easiest and quickest part was editing it!
This was an okay assignment, though. I spent too much time on it, but I rebirthed the old art-lover inside of me, so it was sort of nostalgic too.
