So far, we’ve decided on the format/ theme of the show and how we can split up the work. We’re going to do an interview style radio show where my character is asking the other characters questions.
We have been emailing and we have a document where we can add the questions that we think would be good to ask, which we aim to get done early next week to give us plenty of time to record.
I’m having the time of my life with my radio group.
We are all really dividing the work pretty evenly, which is great because I was terrified of having to do everything in a group. There’s 5 of us, so sometimes I feel like I’m not doing enough, but we are all setting deadlines for each other and working together really well!
As for progress, we met up on Thursday through Zoom and spent around an hour brainstorming and working on the script through a shared Google Doc. It’s roughly done, we just need to organize it a bit and add some details. It probably won’t be too much of a hassle.
We are mostly all using text to speech voices, or AI voices, and we’ve written out what we want our characters saying. We plan to have all of our audios put in the doc by Tuesday-ish. Essentially, the plot is that all of our characters are being interviewed in a group interview by Dr. Ravioli with a live audience, so we get to interact with one another and the radio host (Rav) and the audience! Super fun!!
We also plan to divide the actual putting together of the radio show up. The show is split into parts, so someone will patch together all of that part, another the next, and then someone will be pasting all of the parts together! And we’re all willing to tweak or help each other out wherever needed.
We have also all completed the radio bumpers and commercials needed, as well as finding background music and the intro/outro and things like that. We’ve put a lot of work into it in such little time, I’m impressed!
I’m really happy to be working with these guys, they’re all really nice and meeting through Zoom was really nice to put faces to names (although they couldn’t see my face because my computer doesn’t have a camera . . . so I’m just a name to them still . . . my bad). I’m super excited to see the final result and share it with everyone!!
This week we started really working on our radio show projects. My group found a way to have our show fit both Sydney’s character Georgia, Altan’s character Düşünür, and my own Andrea. Going off our original idea to do a tell-all about Aggressive Technologies, we decided on an interview-style show.
The work was then split up based on what role our character has in the show. Since it’s an interview-style show we’ve been drafting our questions and responses. We also split the work of making the intro, outro, and final compiling of the recordings. Since I love doing all things editing I volunteered to do the latter task so unfortunately the brunt of that work will hit me later next week.
I plan on using DaVinci Resolve for my audio editing specifically because I like how easy it is to manage large projects like this one, unlike Audacity’s very outdated UI. I’ve started putting some things we have already like the ads and bumpers but for now, that’s about it.
I think so far this process is working well. Obviously, you never know until it goes wrong, and that usually happens right at the end but I’m hoping our well-laid-out goals will lead us through.
I made a Google doc on Monday with an outline for the show. It is a good jumping off point for the group to discuss and make changes. I also used the outline provided on weeks 9 and 10 post to make a list on the Google doc of everything out show needs to contain. At least 2 of the group members work during the day so I had to prepare to wait all day for it to be seen. Luckily, I didn’t. My group is super on the ball of getting everything done. Summers, Destiny, Sol, and Greta are the other members. They all make some pretty good stuff. Summers is the creator of Dr. Ravioli and we all voted to name the radio show Ravioli Radio.
Summers put together a different Google doc and organized all of us to do a zoom call on Thursday. It went really well and lasted about an hour. We used my outline as a jumping off point to build a script and decide how it should flow. We went with breaking the show into 3rds with bumpers and commercials between the parts. We decided to have all the characters in the same room so to speak so we will have to upload our dialog in pieces to be used by each other. The 1st and 2nd parts will have the Dr. asking the other characters questions. The 3rd part of the program will have Dr. Ravioli answering questions from the fake studio audience. Everyone is taking a different section to piece together. I have volunteered to take the 3 sections and make it one.
I have made a commercial so far for the show. I still need to record all of Lady Alice’s lines for the show. I could do that for the other audio assignment I need for the week. A one-sided phone call, guess what is going on, on the other side?
I feel very fortunate to be working with such talented people. We all have our assignments and a deadline. Everyone has been really great about communicating with the group on discord. We all have such varying schedules so meeting in person so far hasn’t worked.
During spring break, I reached out to Mustafa to join forces in creating a show that would fit both of our characters. As we rounded out the group with Melea and Tyler, I looked through their blogs to see how our characters could get together and interact to create a fun show. I was pleasantly surprised as to how our characters complimented one another, but also how many of our ideals would clash with one another. This made us think of some dramatic interactions that our characters could have.
We met on Discord first to lay out the general outline of the podcast, and to choose a narrative. I was originally thinking of using a plot where Mustafa’s character Rikaro is slowly figured out as a fugitive, but we ended up leaning more towards the talk show aspect of the podcast, where each character will bring in their own topic to discuss for a segment of the show.
Some of the other logistics we discussed were things such as the method of recording, length of show, and the title of the show.
We took a solid 10 minutes to all brainstorm a good title for our podcast, and we ended up with Logic Pod: The Tech Podium. This was a good general title without giving away too much of what the narrative will be
For the method of recording, we were deciding between having a set script or having general ideas and having a more free-flowing discussion. On one hand, having a script would give us full control over what the content of the show would be, but it may come off as a bit robotic and staged. On the other hand, a free-flowing “one-take” discussion brings in awkward silences and miscommunication if done incorrectly. We are currently leaning towards a structured conversation with a full script, but we will continue to monitor the format as we work through the project.
For some of our characters, their personalities and characterizations required voice changers. For Melea, since her character is a male, she wanted to use an AI voice changer for the conversation. We are looking into different tools to make this happen and to implement this in a not so jarring way.
We concluded with sorting out the work necessary for this week, which was to finish the assigned work (which would conveniently give us more content for the show), and to work on the script for our show so that we can record on a night that everyone can meet. Recording will take place in week 2, and hopefully we can edit everything together in a neat little package.
Currently, I have taken on the role of splicing all of the audio together after they are sent to me, including the different commercials, bumpers, and sounds that we want to use as well as editing the podcast itself, and I’ll document that next week as the process continues. We decided on one person to do the editing as it would be difficult to work on different audacity files all at the same time without it being directly uploaded live to a cloud system.
I’m excited to see how all of our work turns out!
My group has made a lot of progress this week on our show. We have a group google doc where we write our more elaborate ideas and take notes, we have a group discord to post pictures and smaller ideas, and we have had a few discussions and even have a txt group to make sure we are all engaging with the project. It is working magnificently.
We already have a name for our show “Logic Pod: The Tech Podium”. The idea is that this show is a platform for people to call in and talk tech, AI, or anything their hear desires. But be careful, there is something strange about the hosts and guests. Some of them may not be what they seem.
Currently the plan is to have the show be owned/operated by one of our character’s organizations and have my character call in to promote his AI rights activist group. This will lead the conversation into some cool places and interesting discussion. But maybe something will be revealed about some characters or maybe others will change their stance on some things. We are still in the planning process of what the actual conversation will be like, but we have the backbone ideas in place.
We have also created some cool logo/poster/sticker designs for the show. Here is the post about mine.
I think we plan to use our DS106 bumpers from earlier in the semester, but I also feel like making one for our specific show. I have some ideas that I think will be fun. I also think I will make a commercial from the product I had to write about last week for Aggressive Technologies. Ill knock those out tomorrow while teleworking.
I just want to put at the end here, this might be one of the better groups of people I have worked with during my career, and I have been working in the government, military, and private sector for almost 15 years. Robin, Melea, and Mustafa, you rock.
by Greta Hammen
For days we did ping pong messages on Discord and on Thursday, we had a Zoom meeting. This kitty cat radio show is coming together, and we have a 6-page Google doc plan. All of us have good energy and are fully engaged to produce a radio talk show that shows our individual efforts and strengths.
Last week, my Intro to Digital Studies class, had a field trip to Seacobeck and we wore VR googles and went to cool places. I went snow skiing and really felt it in my stomach! They have new, cool podcasting equipment in a room down there. If your group wants to reserve that, talk to the director in that department during regular business hours and they will approve the use of it, for a school assignment. Mikey, a computer science major, helped us and I recommend his generous assistance to navigate the complex equipment.
This week had a lot of assignments and most of them were dependent on others. My group got off to a pretty good start in email and moved to a text group. There we solidified a name for the podcast and also what we are going to be talking about. We decided that we would all do radio bumpers and that we would share them with the group so we could pick three for the show! We also decided that we would be doing movies and how Ai is perceived in movies.
There were a lot of great ideas and I really like how Latifah took initiative this week! It was really helpful and took some stress off of the project which seems like a lot of work. She gave great outlines of what we needed to get done (according to the weekly assignment post) and what she thought would help us get there. All of us participated in the conversation, even though we accidentally typed Jacobs number in wrong, so he was a couple hours behind. Even though that happened he jumped in seamlessly. This helped me get my work done on time and early, so that i can have less stress while I’m working this week with exams and projects coming up for other classes. This group project is probably going smoother than any other group project that I have been in. I also think that it is funny that two of the course characters share the same name and it happens to be my name spelled differently. Overall, I feel like we are making great progress and we will likely have more done by Friday. I am really excited to see what we come up with as a group.
In order to facilitate easy communication this week and the following week, my group members and I started this week by setting up a Discord chat. As a group, we determined that our audio show would focus on the experiences of our course characters with artificial intelligence, specifically with Aggressive Technologies. Since we have three people and require three of each, it works out well that each person should design their own radio bumper and commercial for the project. I believe it would be ideal to use my two audio tasks this week as the radio bumper and commercial, however I’m not sure what my group members choose to do. I used Audacity to create these two different audios, and I anticipate that we will use Audacity for our audio show as well. However, we will probably settle on that next week. We then concluded it would be best to write our script for the following week. Because then we just have to concentrate on filming our portions, creating an opening and a closing, transitional components, background noise, including music, etc., next week will be much easier as long as we set the framework for our show. My contribution to the writing of our show’s script has been substantial. In the end, we decided that each of us would make a logo or poster for the show in that blog for this week. Next week, we will choose our favorite and use it for the show.
So, this week was the first week in terms of working on our radio show with our groups and getting the ground running. Therefore, it was pretty easy to understand what needed to get done this week and what was at utmost importance. The first thing we did at the start of the week was introducing ourselves to each other and creating a discord groupchat that would allow us to communicate with one another efficiently since we did not all know each other before this assignment started. The next thing that we did was, we decided that it would be easier for all of us to create a radio bumper and commercial by ourselves since the show needed three of each. Therefore, over the weekend and throughout the week we spent some time working on this task and making sure everyone had that completed. Furthermore, we realized then, that we each needed to create a logo for this radio show as well and so, we each, once again, created our own logos and would then decide which logo to use at a later date so it was not too much of a hassle right now. Finally, for the first week we agreed that we needed to create a script for the radio show and that it would go by a lot smoother if we knew what was going on and what needed to be said by who. Therefore, we spent a majority of the time during the week working on the script to make sure that the show ran smoothly and everyone was aware of what needed to be said and when. We all agreed that the script would make things a lot easier and more efficient when it came time to record the show and overlap the answers and music as well. We would know exactly when the radio show would break and when there would be silence so that we can fill in those gaps with other audio to keep the show interesting and engaging.