This week was fast moving. We finally got an idea on what we wanted to do for our radio show. Because we couldn’t meet together and record we decided to make the show almost like a podcast and have each of our characters bring our listener on a story of the different crimes they have committed. Each charcter got one episode in which we were responsible for our own commercials and sound.
Once this was done we uploaded our final project to a shared google drive and I compiled them into one show and put it in sound cloud. You can find our final project here!
This week was a slow start. We didnt really get a chance to meet about our project just yet but ideas are flowing through my head like crazy.
Our biggest challenge is scheduling. None of us have the time to meet all together for this project so we are in the midst of coming up with ways we can complete this without meeting together.
Here is the final product of our radio Days of Crime and Roses. By characters: Bethany Smith, Evelynn Calico, and Jasper (on the character Greyson Cole)
Evelyn loves bumper stickers. She is classy but that doesn’t mean that her car doesn’t deserve some love and decoration. Her favorite bumper sticker is one that warns drivers behind her. Where she lives tailgating is a huge problem and she does not stand for it. Getting to work is hard enough, she doesn’t need assholes in her business.
I used a Canva template to get the bumper sticker size and I chose one that just has a black background. I googled goose with a knife because it’s one of my favorite things and it makes me laugh, so I scrolled till I found one I liked. I found this one that said “flock around a find out” and this gave me the idea to make the bumper sticker have a message that warns drivers rather than a “I’m a new driver” type of message. I then added text that said maintain distance and this gives the other drivers instruction on what not to do to find out.
For this project I chose to do an episode from Black Mirror “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too”. I remember using this episode form another assignment for this class but I cannot seem to find it. Oh well.
I used a newspaper template from Canva and found a scene I wanted to write about on youtube. I chose one of the final scenes where the REAL Ashley is trying to get her life back and they crash a car into the stadium where the hologram Ashley is performing. I didnt was to catastrophize the hologram person because in the scene everyone is excited to see specifially Ashley Eternal, so society already knows this person is a hologram. So the big event that happens that disrupts everything in society’s eye is that the car crashed into the stadium and almost ran people over, so this is what I focused my story on. I then thought about the rest of the episode and there is a lot that happens with the character Ashley where she gets poisoned by her aunt and then is replaced by a character called Ashley O. In the timeline Ashley gets poisoned and then there is a time skip fo 6 months. Therefor, the first “read more” story I chose to do a “Where is Ashley” story. I figured I would want to know what is happening if suddenly my favorite singer/songwriter disappeared for six months without announcing anything. The second “read more” story I was on the sudden takeover of Ashley O after the first Ashley disappeared. I tried to make the timeline of events semi-clear by adding dates to the story of when it was published.
Overall, I had fun with this project. I enjoyed reading into an episode and making sure I covered the story in a way that is effective and entertaining for the audience.
“My goals for this class is to learn more about digital media and learn how to be more proficient with technology. For example, Im still learning how to use WordPress and this blog post is still taking me a while to set up because I have no idea how to use this program, but I’m learning! My goal is also to stay on top of the weekly assignments and to not fall behind.”
Above were my goals from the first week of classes. I became so overwhelmed with the new programs we had to use but now that we are 6 weeks in I’m getting the hang of learning new programs and working with them.
With Design and photography week I used a lot of programs I was familiar with but used my creativity in ways I had not before, so that was a great thing to learn.
Audio Week is where I think I started learning how to use new programs and working with them creatively. I had a great time that week with the audio assignments and learned a lot.
In terms of time management, its still a work in progress. I have started getting into the thick of it for my other classes and senior projects so I have to re adjust my schedule from when we started and its taking more time than I want it to. I don’t think I will fall behind too much but Im keeping an eye on it. I would also like to continue with my commenting on three posts per week and hopefully more when I have the time.
This assignment to do a video essay was really fun! I enjoyed revisiting Black Mirror (as did a lot of student in the class).
The episode “Hated in the Nation” was freaky for sure. I did have to stop looking at some scenes for the sake of the intense builds, but I really loved how they did it. I think that Black Mirror does a great job creating a world that is distinctly not ours but could be.
Creating the video essay was tough at first because I wasn’t sure what scene to do. I liked the suggestion to do a scene that is, for lack of a better word, not important or something that doesn’t cover a big plot point. Because the point of this assignment was to focus on the film of it all not the plot. I also had a hard time getting audio due to Netflix’s strict privacy rules, so I wasn’t able to get audio for this assignment which really bummed me out.
To make this I filmed the scene I wanted on my laptop and put it into iMovie. I then recorded my script in Voice Memo all in one recording and spliced it in iMovie. I also went to YouTube and found a Black Mirror starting title and included that in the beginning and end of my video.
Overall, I had fun with this process. I don’t think I’d make video essays on my own time, but I do enjoy watching them so it was fun to be able to do one myself.
I had a tough time coming up with ideas for a radio show. I feel like I dont know my character well enough yet and I wasn’t sure how to include her into the project but after reading some other ideas I have a couple of fun thoughts
I really like the idea of a “true crime” podcast but with the “clue” tropes and comedy. Thank you Liv it up with Liv for suggesting this!
I also enjoy this podcast called Scared to Death and its two people just telling each other scary stories they see on reddit and other peoples paranormal experiences and try to scare each other. This, I think, would be really cool to do as well.
I think that having a thriller aspect to the radio show will be interesting and I think that the true crime or the scary stories would allow for more exploration in the tech noir theme.
For the Sound Effect Short story I had a hard time picking out what story i wanted to tell. So I browsed around on Freesound to see if inspiration struck. And it in fact did! I chose to do a story about two men in an office job, one of them is asleep and is snoring very loud, and the other is extremely annoyed by this (He does this everyday!)
I started with background effects of office noises from BBC Sound Effects, then I looked for a man sighing on Freesound(this was the first part of my inspiration the rest came later, and the rest of my sounds are from Freesound). Next I found another man snoring and I copied and pasted this sound effect three times in the full story. The next step of annoyance is the attempt to wake the person up but discreetly, so I used a man clearing his throat. Once again the man snores so the next step is to get up and wake him up! To do this I used a metal bed frame creak, to implicate the man getting out of his office chair, some footsteps walking over to the man snoring and a blaring alarm clock! Finally the man wakes up with a gasp and the other man laughs and walks away, mission accomplished.
Creating my first radio bumper was daunting at the beginning. Im still not sure how to use audacity and to completely honest I forgot that this was a tool I could use for this assignment. So I used iMovie and Voice Memo to create my radio bumper.
I knew I wanted to add a voice over of introducing the radio show and having a little bop with it. So I created the voice over in the voice memos and it only took two tries! Then I went to iMovie and created the background music. I started out with the “bright” theme music and I thought it would be cool to have a bit of a tease into the not-quite-right feeling you have with the tech noir theme of the course. So I split the theme music and cut it in random places added some points of silence like the sound is cutting out. I really wanted the music to go out with a distorted shut-down type of effect to the music but I wasn’t able to find the right tools for that so I went with a record scratch and a telephone disconnect sound effect.
