Category Archives: Assignments

Create a commercial!

M. Marshall 3.22

Note: This assignment was originally a video idea, but I only used audio, so I feel that counts as an audio assignment.

I created a commercial for a service that relocates (rich) people to Mars. I wanted to be able to use my commercial for the radio show next week, so I started brainstorming ideas. I thought about the cruise to skip Trump’s second term, and I wondered how that could be applied in a futuristic way. I came up with this idea, hopefully it’s entertaining! I wrote out a short script on my phone and read it and recorded it with Audacity. I definitely recorded each snippet (I think there were 8 snippets in total) 2-5 times because I sometimes choke on my words. Practice makes perfect!

Week 9 Summary

This week had a heavier workload compared to last week. Working on the radio show has been a bit stressful in terms of timing, but I’m confident it will all come together just fine. On the bright side, the Daily Creates were really enjoyable, and I had a lot of fun with them this week.

This week’s summary will be brief in terms of details, but rest assured that the work is complete, and I put effort into each assignment. Looking forward to sharing our final show with you next week!

Daily Creates of This Week:

View on Mastodon

View on Mastodon

View on Mastodon

Radio Show

Assignments Completed for the Radio Show:

Radio Show Week 1

Radio Design Project

1-800-kindred spirit

Audio Assignments:

1-800-kindred spirit

Breaking News

Breaking News

Create a breaking news story. This should be fake news. You should create a dialogue and have an AI read it using text to speech. There are several free programs. One possibility is Colossyan.com. Mix in a news jingle to make your story sound legit. You can find some jingles on freesound.org. Be sure to give credit if necessary. 

Be creative, funny, or serious. The choice is yours. Just make it sound realistic.

I used HeyGen for the voice because I wanted to keep the tone light and avoid creating a serious or upsetting breaking news story. Instead, I went with something I wish would happen in real life. After generating the audio, I exported it and brought it into Soundtrap. From there, I made a few minor edits to clean it up and added a classic news broadcaster theme song to give it a “news” vibe. Overall, it was a pretty simple process, but I think it turned out well!

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.