It was interesting to look at these posts through the eyes of Krissy. It took me a minute to gather the posts that I wanted Krissy to react to, but eventually I was able to put together a few that Krissy would have a lot to say about.
I think Krissy would like this post because Sapphira is an empowering femme fatale. I think Krissy would look up to her in a lot of ways, especially as she progresses into her mission. A lot of people view powerful women as rule breakers and society is made to believe they are villains. However, Krissy would know better than this and even relate to it as she views herself as powerfull. Although Krissy’s archetype is not Femme Fatale, like Sapphira, they are both independent women and I think they would be friends.
I think Krissy would be horrified and appalled by this newspaper. She would understand being frusterated with people online but to actively wish death on people is terrible. Additionally, she’d be even more terrified of the twist that the people who used the #deathto hashtag would die. Krissy would be terrified of this concept and it would remind her of how scary and powerful technology has become. She would use this as a reminder while she goes off to fight her mission.
Krissy would be terrified if she heard this on her radio. She doesn’t own any smart home devices because her family thinks they make you lazy. However, just because she doesn’t have these devices, doesn’t mean she doesn’t empathize with the people who do. Krissy would also be terrified for what this means for the future of technology, will people find a fix for this problem or will they just become more sneaky to avoid getting caught. Maybe this is what ultimately leads to the demise of the future.
I looked over my goals for the semester and they can be boiled down to 3 simple sentences. 1. Improve my skills further than a basic understanding for some softwares 2. Utilize skills picked up from this class to make learning how to use new softwares easier 3. Better my time management
Improve My Skills Further Than a Basic Understanding For Some Softwares
When I took Intro to Digital Studies, I used a lot of different creative softwares for my projects. I would learn how to use the software, make my project, submit it, and repeat the cycle. This semester is a second chance. I already have a basic understanding of those softwares and can now hone my skills. I improved the most in my audio editing. The software is easy to use, and I like being creative with it. The radio bumper, sound effect story, and Guess the Song assignments took me no longer than a few minutes. I also used it to edit my Video Essay. My voiceover was less than perfect, and using Adobe Premiere made editing the audio complex, but it was a breeze with Adobe Audition! I’m happy to say that I have met this goal and hope to improve more throughout the course.
Utilize Skills Picked Up From This Class to Make Learning How to Use New Softwares Easier
Unfortunately, I’m still mastering the softwares that I already knew and I haven’t had the time nor the patience to try out a new software. Therefore, I have not met this goal yet.
Better My Time Management
I felt overwhelmed by the hefty to-do lists when I started this class. I remember Week 2 especially was tough. I definitely have improved my time management by utilizing my to-do lists and learning how long an assignment usually takes me. For example, at the beginning of the week, I write down all my tasks on one to-do list, and then I make a second to-do list and decide what my tasks will be for that day. I normally decide what tasks I will do based on how much time I have that day. This strategy helps me stay organized and ahead of my assignments without feeling overwhelmed by the volume of tasks. Additionally, the workload has simply died down. Even on weeks where there’s a lot, it’s still not as much as the Digital Bootcamp Weeks. So, I did meet this goal, but the goal met me halfway.
I tuned in at 7:05 to listen to DS106 radio. It took me a good minute or two to understand what I was listening to because I had tuned in part way through. I was listening with my friends in the room, and I asked them if they knew of anything called Limetown, and they were able to fill me in. The story was interesting, I wanted to listen from the beginning because I was hooked, but I was also playing catch-up. This episode was a good one to tune into because Dorothy explained who Max was, how she ended up in Limetown, and vaguely described the technology enough for me to understand. Some of the acting was a little cheesy, but that’s typical in a fictional podcast series. Knowing what I know now from this week’s lesson, it was interesting to see music and sound effects applied. For example, in the park, there was a nice ambiance to let the listeners know they were outside. The sound effects were seamless, so I wonder if the audio was recorded outside because the sound was blended in so effortlessly. Another interesting thing was that Dorothy said that when she was sneaking out to get the chip implant, she described the scene as “something out of a tech noir”; coincidentally, my friend described the episode as something out of Black Mirror. It’s funny and meta that she would compare it to tech noir when she is very much in a tech noir setting herself. I’m glad I tuned in because I saw that Limetown was not only a podcast series but also a book and a TV show, so I’m interested in looking into the rest because this is a terrific story.
The two biggest takeaways I got from Jad Abumrad’s videos were Co-Auhorization and creating a connection to the story. Abumrad says the lack of pictures in forces listeners to use their imagination. By telling a story, he is painting the picture, but by listeners using their imagination, we are holding the brush; this is called co-authorship. He is telling the story and I am illustrating it, and in turn adding a few details in myself. Additionally, in order to create co-authorship, a storyteller needs to be able to create a dream like state to connect the listener to the story. If a story is interesting enough, it will immerse the listener into the story where they can add their own takes. Sound in a story is like seasoning on a dish, too little is bland and the listener becomes bored, but too much is overpowering and overwhelms the listener. In Moon Graffiti, the effect that made their voices sound like they were coming through walkie-talkies helps remind the reader that the story takes place in 1969. The sad, quiet, monotone song that plays while the astronauts are putting down a memorial, knowing that they will have to be memorialized too, and sooner than they thought, adds an eerie depressing tone to the story that makes your heart break for these men. Abumrad said in his video that co-authorization creates empathy, and that definetly rings true in this podcast. Because I am illustrating the story, it makes me feel like I am in there shoes, like I have two hours left to live with little to no hope of surviving. It makes the listener sad, but it also helps put into perspective how amazing and impressive it is that, in real life, they were able to put men on the moon and get them back unharmed. Knowing what could have been the outcome, I am so happy that these astronauts were able to achieve this dangerous feat and still return back to Earth. In summary, I found it very interesting how Jad Abumrad emphasized the role of imagination and creating a connection with the audience, it gave me a lot to think about when it comes to crafting a compelling narrative.
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.
