So my final video went over 2 minutes, but it still stayed within the 2 minute range so hopefully Aggressive Technologies doesn’t kick me out of their conference.
My goal with this video was to purposely make it spontaneous and free flowing. I realized that the majority of my output in this class was meticulously planned and scripted out. For a reflection video such as this, I wanted to let all of my thoughts out in free flow, but this also made it difficult to keep it under 2 minutes as I’m a rambler.
What a crazy few months it has been. From our humble beginnings with setting up our blogs and writing film reviews, all the way to making collaborative radio shows and final projects that showcased all of the different technologies we worked with. This class has been an adventure that I would have never imagined back in January, and I’m grateful for all of the lessons and experiences I had.
Thank you to Professor Bond for steering us in the right direction every week without limiting our creative scopes. I hope to take the skills I learned to enhance my work in the future, as well as my daily life.
I tuned into the Monday broadcast of ds106 radio, where both our own show and another was played. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of people that showed up to listen to the entire 1.5ish hours. It was fun to chat with other classmates as well as Professor Bond about the shows live, and it felt like a coming together of ds106 that we have periodically throughout the semester.
For the first segment of the show, we listened to Logic Pod, which was the show that our group created. This was my third time listening to the entire podcast with no interruptions or skipping, and my experience changed with each listen. The first time, I wasn’t too keen on the details and just wanted to pump out a completed show to finish the assignment. The second time, I listened to it with a friend and focused more on enjoying the show and taking in how it makes us feel.
During the third listen for ds106 radio, I began to be much more critical of our work. In terms of the editing, I realized that the audio could have been balanced much better, and a few of the cuts to different speakers were too abrupt. Definitely nitpicky, but good reflections regardless.
I got the chance to go on air live with Professor Bond and talk a little more about the process. Other than a few technical issues, it was awesome yet nerve-wracking to be on air live in front of almost 20 people.
The second portion of the show was dedicated to Ravioli Radio. Right off the bat, I noticed that their show was very similar to ours; a podcast style discussion where different topics are brought into focus. However, I quickly realized that their use of audio clips and the tone of the topics contrasted heavily to our own show.
From an overall vibe standpoint, Ravioli Radio felt like a few friends gathered together to have a good time. It was a breath of fresh air to have more lighthearted topics, while still keeping the format of a good podcast. It felt much less transactional than Logic Pod, where all of our characters meant business and each of us had our own agenda to push in a limited amount of time.
I really appreciated Ravioli Radio’s usage of sound effects, particularly the applause and the addition of a live audience. The use of these sounds never felt redundant, as each audience clip was slightly different from the others, and wasn’t overused. It added another element of depth and immersion to the show, and it made me think about the things I can add to my projects in the next few weeks.
This week marked the completion of our group’s radio show. I was in charge of primarily doing the final edit, so I will speak mostly on that. The script and dialogue choices were excellent from my team!
There were a good amount of changes from last week. Taking the feedback from Professor Bond and after some discussions, we realized that having a recording day and trying to record a podcast live would be a difficult task. We decided on writing a script and recording our own pieces of dialogue instead. We compiled all of this as well as our commercials and bumpers in our discord group chat for easy file transfer.
The downside to this was that we were not on the same page with each and every dialogue piece. A lot of our recordings were not in response to others, and I since I was unfortunately busy throughout the week, I wasn’t able to add my own dialogue into the script. As a solution, I used my character almost like a glue piece. I tried to make responses to what the other members said, rather than stating my own opinions on our topics. I believe that this made our podcast more coherent and gave it a bit more “flow”.
Since I was in charge of making the final product and editing the clips together, I decided to sprinkle in some of my flair and directed the podcast towards more of a narrative, one that blended each of our initial ideas from our posts together, and add some of the sound effect design we heard during the radio week and listening to ds106 radio. Much of the audio and background tracks were already included by the group members’ commercial and bumper projects, but I had to make my own additions for the introduction and closing, as well as adding some sound effects.
This is what some of my workflow in audacity looked like. By the end of it all, there were so many different segments I had to keep track of. Initially, I thought this would be just an easy mashup of all of the clips sent to me, but soon enough I was overwhelmed by the amount of clips I had to keep track of in both the audacity interface as well as on my computer files. I had to make a separate checklist to see which ones I’ve used already, and make a sequence of files that I can follow while staying on script.
The biggest hurdle I faced while editing was adjusting the volume of different segments. The talking, AI voices, commercials, and bumpers were not the same volume. Each separate “block” of audio had to be set at a specific volume, either raising or lowering it. I decided to group most of the same type of file into one block. For example, all of my dialogue for Hwei was put together in a single block. Both Rikaro and Isaiah’s voices had similar volumes, so I was able to put those two together.
There were some pieces of audio that were either super quiet or super loud, so I had to make a separate block for these and adjust accordingly. This made the UI very congested, as I had to scroll up and down to match the audios to the correct timing. I ended up with almost 10 different blocks! If I didn’t implement the organization tactics, I would have been very confused. It’s the same as writing a bunch of “spaghetti code” in programming. A lot of jumbled up code, but it’s hard to work with and it ends up becoming a bunch of nonsense.
Another hurdle I had to overcome was my own OCD. I ended spending almost 7 straight hours on creating the final version of this edit, and much of the time was dedicated to trying to perfect the timings of transitions, and how some of the music purposefully bleeds into the transitions when we came back to the discussion portion of the podcast. For example, I made sure that the end of the bumper music would fade out at the optimal time while I blended in Isaiah’s voice back in to create a seamless transition effect.
The edit that I’m most proud of is Hwei’s last piece of dialogue, where my character starts to disagree heavily with the direction of the podcast and the group’s clashing ideals of AI. To add an aura of suspicion and uneasiness, I added a backtrack to the dialogue portion, which wouldn’t usually be done for a podcast, but I wanted to add a some element of a radio story theme to the final product, just like the stories we listened to during ds106 radio.
While trying to find a suitable audio clip on freesound.org, I suddenly had the inspiration to add the soundtrack from one of my favorite games, Persona 4.
I played this game way back when I was a high schooler, but much of the Persona series music sticks with me to this day. I think this song fits perfectly with the vibe that I was trying to portray; a sense of mystery, uneasiness, and conflict.
To conclude this sequence, I added the phone hang up beep at the perfect part of the audio clip, where a few seconds has passed since Hwei stopped talking, but the audio clip continued to play. Just before the second sequence of the track went on, I abruptly ended it. I then purposely left a big gap between the end of the sequence and Isaiah continuing on with his show to make it clear that Isaiah was taken aback, and was thinking about how to proceed afterwards.
If I could have coordinated with my group AFTER having this idea, I would’ve had Isaiah and Rikaro react to my aggressive monologue, but I think it’s almost poetic that Isaiah brushed it off. Business as usual for the man with the agenda, as if nothing happened. Isaiah then announces that the next guest will be from Aggressive Technologies, completely disrespecting what Hwei said in the previous segment. I think this last portion of the show captured the storytelling aspect of our show, and I’m really proud of the editing and narrative direction I took.
Looking back, I definitely did not have to obsess over every millisecond of detail, but I actually had so much fun trying to create my own masterpiece! Definitely all part of the learning process.
This is what my final Audacity file looked like zoomed out. While this doesn’t look like that much, it felt like a TON during the process. There were small intricate timings in between each of those boxes of audio, and I learned to not take the small details lightly. Again, I am very proud of our work on this project, and I’m looking forward to seeing what others in the class think, as well as some of my close friends that I might send this project to!
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.
Looking back at my first post, I made an honest reflection on why I decided to enroll in the course and what my outlook for the future is. I’d say that most of this still stands true, but I’d like to add how my perspective of audio and visual elements shifted within the last 2 weeks.
I listened to a variety of audio storytelling pieces in the assignments I did as well as the DS106 radio session. I was fascinated by the amount of detail and attention that goes into the careful crafting of sounds to create a narrative. The audio stories that I created for my assignment bank projects was my first venture into creating these myself, and although I’m still a novice, I found myself really enjoying the work. For the visual side, I’m currently working on the film analysis assignment, and this has also given me a new perspective on popular films that I have watched.
The bulk of this class is still storytelling and updating the blog, but I have definitely found a greater appreciation for the attributes that make up these stories. I’m looking forward to doing more audio and visual work for the rest of the semester.
I’d like to say that I’m an avid listener of podcasts and radio shows. My long commutes to school and work often allows me to finish a chunk of these at a time, and I really enjoy the insights I get from my favorite podcasters. I will say however, that my scope of interests is severely limited, with the majority of my listening time being taken up by Gill Gross’ Tennis podcast.
Gill does a lot of tennis post-match commentaries detailing the strategies of players, historic implications, among many other things a tennis fanatic can get behind. However, I realize that for the purpose of DS106, I probably can’t do a tennis broadcast with my course character along with my partner’s characters.
To tell a story about AI with connections to our characters within a 20-30 minute window, I think that creating a little short story with sound effects and dialogue included would be an interesting way to fulfill the requirements, similar to the radio stories we listened to during the DS106 radio broadcast this week. I haven’t really thought of the specifics yet, but I think this will become more clear after the groups have been assigned and we get to talk about everyone’s characters and their interests.
For the live DS106 radio session this week, I was working at night for all 3 of the sessions. However, I was able to check into the Wednesday night’s show and it was an absolute pleasure.
The first story called “A Logic Named Joe” was a lighthearted comedic interpretation of what the internet would look like back in the 50s. A lot of the transition effects sounded similar to a cartoon movie with its wonky antics. Some of the distance effects allowed for us to decipher the situation more clearly, and where each character was located during each part of the story. The most interesting thing I noticed was how the interpretation of an AI assistant didn’t sound very robotic at all. It sounded more like an older movie narrator with much more personality than what I imagined people in the 50s expected AI to be.
The second story was “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” and this was a big shift between the last story. A lot of the creeking of doors and chairs, footsteps, and other subtle sounds made the story eerie, with each one adding to a sense of overall urgency in the story. There was a lot more to take in with this story, and I really appreciated all of the intricate sound effects used to portray the story. Professor Bond mentioning that the bell ringing at the end of the story signaled that the location was at a service desk, and I wouldn’t have caught that without his insight.
Overall I took a lot of lessons away from this session, and I’d definitely tune in again for some more stories.
The videos presented in this week’s reflection material felt very familiar to me. I recently took a class in UI/UX designing and some of these design elements come into play in the field of technology as well.
One of the elements I would like to go in depth with is the strategic use of color. The Vanity Fair video featuring James Verdesoto was very insightful for making connections between the film industry and the tech space of UI/UX. A lot of my favorite movies were featured in this video, including Star Wars and Avatar. What surprised me is the dominant nature of a specific color within film genres. For example, the use of blue is prominent in almost every action thriller poster, used to bring out the technological, high speed natures of the films.
However, the introduction of orange as a complimentary color introduces new ways for the colors to be used, with blue often being a background while the orange/yellow highlights the most important subjects such as the main characters.
There are some comparisons to be made in films vs. UI/UX elements. Take a look at this chart describing the use of each color:
Blue is not implemented as a thrilling color in any way of the imagination, yet can still be used signaling intelligence and tech such as Microsoft’s implementation in windows. The use of colors in contrasting ways exemplifies that not every color has a specific correlation to a certain emotion, situation, or overall vibe. Who knows, maybe in our future AI world, colors are interpreted by AI in different ways to the point where they convey completely different meanings!
I decided to take on this assignment in a public library, and I faced some difficulties with the tasks I was given. A few of them required me to go outside to take the pictures but luckily I was planning on leaving within the allotted 20 minutes anyways, so I was able to get these photos.
Start time: 5:05PM
Take a picture that emphasizes a single color.
Take a picture of an object that is a metaphor for your learning style
Make a portrait of someone with catchlights in their eyes.
Take a photo showing the wide open space, the great outdoors.
Make a photo dominated by your favourite colour and share it!
Take a photograph of a toy in action
Make a photograph of the front of a building.
End time: 5:25pm
I was surprised at how many of these could be done from the limited space of a tiny room. I had to be creative with the types of props to use for my images, such as my water bottle and the leftover trash from my snack. It forced me to be creative with photography and it was a fun way to get my creative juices flowing while taking a study break.
