This week, my group finished development and produced our final radio show! I would like to take this moment to issue a formal apology to Feli, who edited our show together. It was a really busy week and I was not as punctual as I should have been about recording my part. Thank you to my group for being patient.
Our final product is really fun. Our radio show leans into the cultishness of Aggressive Technologies, as well as Georgia and Andrea’s unwavering support of said cultishness. Our product is very entertaining and I hope you enjoy!
I decided to wait till after I completed my radio show to write this progress blog. The reason I did that was I wanted to blog about my whole experience with the project. I also wanted to focus on getting it completed and turned in on time. Now let’s get into my experience of this project. For starters working with my group was a pleasure, everyone did their part, and everyone communicated with one another. We had no conflicts with each other and worked diligently to complete our project in a timely manner. Looking at the radio show itself; we used Audacity to record our whole show. We had no issues with the application. We uploaded all of our different radio bumpers, intros, outros, and commercials to Audacity. From there it was a matter of just editing the recording session to blend all the different elements of radio show into one unison recording. I will admit the only thing our group struggled with was recording what we were going to say. We had to restart many times because we messed up our lines. This made me realize how hard it is to record radio shows or any type of audio and the process that goes into it to make it perfect. Other than that, I would say our radio show was a success. I can’t wait for you guys to hear it; I think you’ll enjoy it.
I am very proud of how our final radio show turned out and I am glad my group went the route we did when creating the show.
Originally, we were going to set aside time this week to record the interview segments as a group. We realized this would be too difficult with the use of voice changers, so we agreed to write all of our parts in a shared document and then record separately. While I realized that this would be easier on the recording end, I thought that the end result may end up being really awkward and clunky. I am happy to say that the final result flowed fairly naturally.
In terms of script writing, I think my part was fairly easy because as the host most of my lines are filler transitions. All in all it really didn’t take much to write and record all of my parts. I sent all of my clips to Robin who was in charge of editing.
Here is the final result: https://soundcloud.com/robin-yu-527647770/logic-pod-the-tech-podium?si=ffb306d35c5e4718adbf8eca5a39fb5b&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
We have completed our radio show! This week we finalized the script and format of the show and each recorded our parts. We added our commercials radio bumpers into the final project as the finishing touches.
This was a smooth process thanks to my wonderful groupmates, Feli Badji and Sydney Krug. I’m proud of the final project and would love to hear y’alls thoughts if you can give it a listen.
The radio show is finally complete! This week was where all the actual work past the easy planning and writing started. Before anything else could get done we needed a script. We had laid out our show idea and some general question ideas down but we needed to solidify the actual concept. So I made an outline for our script laying a general idea of what questions had to be asked and our dodgy responses that incorporated just enough deception for maximum cult manipulation.
Like I said on my last radio show update, I chose to use DaVinci Resolve to do my editing. So once the sounds were chosen and the audio recorded I started compiling them all into one project. There was a fair bit of audio editing I did to try to normalize the audio levels and fix any background noises. And while it is definitely not as good as it would be if we were able to record all together in a podcast studio, I made the best of what we had. So after tweaking the EQ, dynamics, background removal, cutting some of the speaking errors in the audio, and smoothing out the jumps between different cuts, the podcast was done!
I also used the podcast design I made last week for the image on SoundCloud where you can all now listen to Düşünür trying to catch Georgia and Andrea lying about the Aggressive Tech’s intentions.
This week was a wind whirl! There were so many moving parts and my group and I got everything finished by Wednesday! To me that is a record because I make sure everything is perfect before turning it in.
I will start by saying that working in a group was not for me. However, we did complete the Radio Show which you can listen to down below!
If you want to read how the two weeks went during this process you can click here
I also created a new bumper for the radio show and you can read about my journey creating the bumper that is in the radio show!
In total, the work load this week was light…on my end of things. I wish that this week could have gone differently but I am ready to move on. I hope next week will be enjoyable. Till next week.
I spent time this week creating dialogue between my character, Natasha Sidorov, and Dr. Ravioli. The group agreed that text to voice generation would be best, due to the varied schedules. We created short MP3’s on www.elevenlabs.com and uploaded them on SoundCloud. Sarah Bradshaw volunteered to start getting them together in Audacity, Destiny had some time on Wednesday and Friday, during the day, to contribute to that and on Thursday, I assembled four clips to make the ending of the talk show, using Premiere Pro https://on.soundcloud.com/wHc7wmsgVqnEWPGa7 and Marisol recorded her character’s parts and sent them to SoundCloud, as well. I recorded six MP3’s during the week and saved them on Soundcloud. The final full show can be enjoyed here: https://on.soundcloud.com/1ENr7wciHvbgMJPP7.
The group was easy to work with and we were able to create a talk show with our characters interacting in various ways with Dr. Ravioli. It is my hope that in one of my other classes, next semester, I get the opportunity to use the Podcast equipment on campus. I believe that being together on location and reading our parts with good quality microphones will be a unique experience with minimal editing to clean it up, for a polished recording.
This week was all about putting it together. I used Natural Readers to convert my lines into an AI voice. I am female with having a male character so this was very important for me to complete. To me this was the easy part because the lines were already typed so it was really:
After I did all of that my lines did not even equal the 6 minutes which was needed to make the time frame. I had to redo some lines and make them longer but that did not take up much time.
I also redid my bumper because I felt like it did not go with the show.
Here is the old bumper:
Here is the new bumper:
I feel like the new bumper is way better but I wish I had put the music all the way through. By the time I noticed the music did not go all the way through, it was in the radio show already and I did not want to be that person to ask them to put in a different one. That was bad on my part 100% I should have double checked it.
The next day I was sent the final project through Discord because that is where my group and I were discussing the project at hand. Rishi (one of my group members) had put all of the audios together and made it one talk show. However, I did notice a few little details that needed to be made but he made sure to quickly edit the audio.
My first reaction was “oh they were using their real voices and reading off of the script.” I was not expecting that at all! I felt so out of place again; using an AI voice, it made my character stick out like a sore tongue. I ended up asking my group if I should redo my part and maybe have someone that is a male to read my script, but they said AI was okay.
Then I got nervous because after I complete an assignment I always check to make sure I had all the requirement made and sure enough something caught my attention.
“It must not be just a recording of a conversation.”
The reason this had me nervous was because our radio show was a talk show with no background noise or anything really at all other than us talking. Of course, we had the bumpers and the commercials which all had sound with them, but man was my hands sweating. I ended up emailing the professor about this issue I was worried about.
I was told to write about it and here it is:
At the beginning of this project, I felt pushed aside because I could tell the two people I was working with were actually discussing things without me. How? Who knows, maybe they were friends, maybe they had other classes together. I do not know but one thing I do know is that I started the discord with them and there was no communication from them until I was TOLD that they were going to write the script and I just need to create a logo and record mine lines.
Once I had a chance to open discord since making it, I was stunned. I was kind of upset because they did not want my input on the plot or lines. The time I read they were going to make the lines, the intro was already made…I did not read the intro at this time but instead I offered my help but they did not want it.
Fast forward a little bit, I told them I did not feel like we were all on the same page and I asked them to find a time where we can all talk about the script and once again, they said no… at this moment I gave up working with them. I kept my head down and recorded the lines they gave to me. I will say they asked me if I wanted to add anything but at the time there was nothing I could do.
They made it into a talk show…Not much you can add if someone has it already finished. I gave them my bumper and my commercial and they put everything together creating the radio show. Again, I was stunned, they used their real voice and my character was AI created so they sound very very different, not once did they tell me that they were using their real voice. However, I did not tell them I was using AI. Just bad communication.
I brought up the fact of redoing the whole show over again with a different plot and they turned that down really quick. I do understand that they put in a lot of time and effort however, I know this is not what the professor wanted and it makes me upset knowing that we could do better. At this time it was Wednesday, I told them because I want to redo it that I will do all the lines and editing but they did not want their effort to get throw away. (I completely understand this). We sent it into canvas and now we hope for the best.
I feel as though I was the odd ball out and it really sucked. I have been looking forward to this project ever since we found out about it and I feel like I was let down by my group in every way possible. I had no creativity in this project, and I am a very creative person so to just watch it all happen was depressing and stressful. I really hope we do not get stuck with the same group, and I say that in the nicest way possible. I am sure they are great people who did not mean for this project to make me feel pushed to the side.
All in all. I loved the idea of working in a group for the radio show, but I know the result could have been better. Here’s to another week…I guess.
Update from the radio show! My group was probably the best group assignment I have ever been in and I am a senior lol! My group was super accommodating and we worked well as a team! So shoutout to Pop Perception group for all their hard work! I had a really fun time with this project as we got talking about Marvel movies and Spider-Man!
We had been chatting for a while back and fourth and got to know each other a little bit better which I think helped with the brain storming part because we got to understand each other better!
I hope everyone had a good radio show with their groups!
