Category Archives: Assignments

Getting Our Show Off the Ground!

I’m looking forward to next week and really getting in to writing, performing, and editing the radio show! This week was sort of odd, as I felt like I should have done more to work done on the final product. However, I think using the audio assignments to make small progress will ultimately be helpful. I’m really excited about the idea that we have for our show, adn just want to work on that! I guess I really don’t know what to write about here!

I talked through a lot of ideas and things with Rebecca, but Ethan really only connected with the rest of the group on Discord towards the end of the week. But now that we’re all on the same page, it should all be good!

Turns Out, Listening to Podcasts Doesn’t Mean Making Cover Art Will Be Easy

For my little bit of design work this week, I created a logo/cover art for our radio show, Days of Crime and Roses. I used Adobe Illustrator for this, and sourced my font off of 1001 Fonts, which isn’t a font site that I’ve used before but I liked the variety! Once I found one that I liked, I ported it in to Illustrator and began working. My base was a paper texture that I duplicated and changed the blending mode on. After that, I continued adding both tech elements like the glitch effect and pixels as well as physical elements like the newspapers and coffee stains. I think this design would work well as a cover image or social media icon, and I think the font is strong enough to act as a general logo! I didn’t want to go for anything too literal, which did make getting started a bit difficult.

Radio Show: Week One

M. Marshall 3.21

Let’s talk about the radio show! To get the ball rolling, my group discussed our characters and what we had previously posted about for our radio shows and our characters. We did a Zoom where we pretty thoroughly discussed different aspects to the radio show like what the idea would be, how to make it cohesive, potential issues, things like that. My group is Emily, Brigid, Sam and me. We talked through things like that we would use Audacity to record, our radio show would be covering news events in different cities in the U.S., I created a Google Drive so that we would have one easy place to access the files we have, and how we would do the commercials. We agreed to try to make the length of our individual shows and the commercial we make total at or under 7 minutes. The math will probably even out to be the shows are about 5-6 minutes and the commercials will be 1-1.5. Overall, I thought it went pretty well and felt like it was a really solid start. We’ve texted about different things like using one of the required audio assignments for this week to make a commercial and I think I am also going to make a new radio bumper. My other radio bumper, while fine, was not really applicable to my character and I would obviously like the radio bumper to be relevant, lol. That’s what I have so far, once the show is completed next week I will likely have lots to say about how that process went. Until then, I hope you enjoyed reading!

Promo!

M. Marshall 3.21

So my group has discussed a couple of different ideas for our radio show, what we landed on was having one in the style of a news report. I figured that promoting my character’s part of the show made the most sense, so that’s what I started with. Like I’ve said in past posts, my character is a cyborg cat. I want my portion of the show to be about how she was turned part robot, so I used AI to create an image. I know using AI is not great for the environment, but I wanted it to look a certain way that I knew I could not illustrate. I went to Canva to start and I discovered their AI image generation tool, so I used that! I would have liked to put “tune in on” this date or this day of the week, but I opted not to just to prevent inaccuracy. The prompt I gave the robot was “I would like an image of a cyborg cat (part robot, part cat), basing the cat off of the cat in the image” with a photo of my cat, Daisy, which I will of course show.

The resemblance is remarkable, honestly!

I added text over and had it be outlined because it was somewhat difficult to read without.

So, yeah! Tune in to find out!

Welcome, DOCAR!

I decided to modify the “Good Morning Message” assignment in order to make an intro for our radio show, Days of Crime and Roses (aka DOCAR).

I used Audacity to cut together Frank Sinatra’s Days of Wine and Roses in order to make it a little more tech noir. I used a video of a women demonstrating how to pronounce the word “crime” in order to get a human audio of the word, and then copied the audio and distorted it in several different ways. I used my favorite YouTube to mp3 converter to turn these into editable files. I also grabbed a static effect from FreeSounds just to make everything extra disorienting. My favorite part of all of this was finding the perfect piece of instrumental to go under the word “crime” to make it fit within the rest of the song.

1-800-kindred spirit

For “Create a Commercial,” create a commercial using a video editor such as iMovie, Adobe, ect. In this assignment, you should aim to make a commercial for your radio show. In the commercial, you can create a whole new product or use one that is already out, such as an advertisement for Apple Inc., Nike, Walmart, etc. Try NOT to make it too long or else your viewer will get upset, limit to 10-30 seconds.

Link to assignment: https://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/creat-a-commercial/

For our radio show, which explores dating in the tech-noir, digital world, I decided to create a commercial that fits the theme. I came up with the concept of a fictional dating app called Kindred Spirit, designed to connect people in a digital age. To bring it to life, I used HeyGen for the voiceover, selecting a tone that suited the futuristic vibe of the app. After extracting the audio, I uploaded it to SoundCloud for editing.

I added commercial style background music to enhance the atmosphere and applied fade-in and fade-out effects for a realistic sound. I also adjusted the volume levels to ensure the voiceover and music balanced well together. The whole process was fun, and I’m proud of how realistic the final commercial sounds. It feels like something you’d hear on an actual radio station.

Podcast Ads of the Past

For this assignment, I completed the “MailChimp Message,” but instead with a more modern podcast sponsor. I listen to a lot of podcasts and have heard Quince advertised on almost every single one, so I opted to do that. Our radio show, Days of Crime and Roses, is now oficially sponsored by Quince! Hearing the MailChimp ad was so nostalgic, as I remember listening to it on Serial all those years ago!

To complete this, I used text-to-speech generators of several different voices. I ported everything into Audacity and spliced it all up. After that, I used Aiva to create the perfect backing audio for my ad and may propose using the same audio (or something similar) for our radio show!

Opposites Attract

The show is coming soon!! Tune in to “The Opposites” next weekend and listen to your hosts, Eric and DK, help their listeners through all sorts of problems during this new and developing digitized age.

I created a promo poster for our upcoming radio show, The Opposites, using Canva to explore how society has changed with increasing technological advancements. I designed the poster in monochrome—black, white, and gray—to emphasize that not everything is glamorous as technology develops, and to reflect the show’s darker undertone. The poster’s darkness also aligns with our class theme of tech noir, which was another goal of mine. I also added a slight glitch effect to the text to reinforce the theme of technology and contrasted older music cartridges with modern smartphones to provide the audience with a visual representation of the development the show highlights. I really enjoyed making this poster as a form of advertisement.

Radio Show Week 1

For the first half of the week, a group member and I were planning the storyline and structure of our radio show project on Discord, as we were waiting to get the whole team together. Since we wanted to keep moving forward, we decided to go ahead and plan the show. The concept centers on Eric and DK, polar opposites and unlikely best friends, who co-host a radio advice show. They tackle relationship dilemmas and current topics, and their contrasting perspectives create entertaining dynamics. We also introduced Finn, a socially awkward but successful CEO, who calls in for dating advice, sparking a discussion about the digitized dating world.

We spent the week outlining and scripting, with plans to record over the weekend or Monday, leaving the rest of the week for editing. Although we weren’t able to create bumpers or commercials yet, we focused on the scripting and promotion. Personally, I wrote a rough script and outline for the show and created a promo. We’re staying on track with our plan and will continue working on the project, aiming to have everything ready for submission next week.

Canva and Google Docs are the only tools I’ve used this week.