I completed 2 Daily Creates this week! Both were personal, and about my passions and what I love. Reading books in a cozy area is my safe haven. My other DC was about having #NoLimits; Reaching new heights and pushing boundaries! I believe that breaking barriers and making new achievements is my fuel to keep going.
Here is the Fearless Femmes Radio Show Progress REPORT! I absolutely loved working with this group of ladies. They are all just fabulous! Our Fearless Femmes radio show went amazing. I have never completed an assignment like this before so it was all fairly new to me and overall such a great experience. This report gives a layout of how we prepared for the radio show this week leading up to the recording day, also how we overcame challenges together, I talk about Martina’s fantastic editing skills, and lastly, how proud we were to turn in our work. I believe that all of us were very happy with the outcome and enjoyed listening to all the final creation. I’m excited to get feedback on this and hopefully get our other classmates to listen to it.
I wanted to post a link with the podcast, for those who wanted to listen to other classmates now. But I didn’t see any instructions for that so I’ll wait just in case Week 11 is when we are supposed to share it!
I hope I get the chance to check out the other groups radio shows as well!
This was a great and productive week. I participated in two Daily Creates and focused on the radio show for the rest of the week. I met with my group, and we seamlessly recorded our show at the DKC podcast studio. Since Finn is male and I have a fairly high voice, we decided to use an AI voice, which worked out well. We used SoundCloud to edit the show, which was perfect for this assignment because it allowed us to add music and audio clips. I had fun working with my group, and I’m glad we found time to record this week. It was also nice meeting some classmates in person!
Here are the Daily Creates I participated in this week.
It has been filmed! This week me and my group made and edited our final script, focused on a central theme of dating in a more digitalized age with dating apps and algorithms in control. We then used the Podcast Studio in the Digital Knowledge Center to film our base radio show, recording 4 scenes to split up later in the editing process. The recording was pretty straightforward, but editing was a bit more challenging. We used soundtrap, which is a program I have never used before, but enjoyed testing and exploring. Trying to find the right times to layer sounds in the background and not disrupt the flow of the conversation. Finding all of the right timings and cutting clips when needed and easing into bumpers and commercials made for a time-consuming editing process, but I’m glad the experience is under my belt now. The finished product can be found here on SoundCloud!
You know the drill. Here are my 2 daily creates for the week:
For this DC I posted a picture of a stack of books because I love reading books! Not only do I love reading books, but I also love reading them in a cozy comfortable environment. Where the sun is shining through, creating natural light, it’s quiet, and the seat is comfy!
For this DC, I got a little personal and shared a photo that said, “Dreams Know No Boundaries.” I also shared a little bit about my own goals and how I plan to keep following my dreams. With the ending hashtag of: #NoLimits
Okay, this group was hands down one of the best groups of people I have ever worked with! I would actually consider doing a real podcast with them in real life if we all could, no joke!
The fearless femmes made progress all week long! Monday/Tuesday we finalized our scripts and decided what types of bumpers, commercials, and everything like that we wanted to include. On Wednesday we recorded our first recording at the DKC recording studio, it was kind of an epic fail. Although, it was an outstanding first recording but then, the file got corrupted and decided to die on us. So, on Thursday we gave it another go, and our second recording was even better, of course! Thursday night, Martina/Lady Bird was so wonderful to complete the editing for us. She said she had a really nice program to use, and her editing skill set is far more advanced than any of the rest of ours (I think). Martina did an outstanding job on editing, and we are all so appreciative of her hard work and help with this entire project!! Today is Friday, and we are proudly turning it in.
I absolutely loved getting to work with this group of ladies. They are incredibly smart, talented, and have wonderful personalities. 10/10 in every category for this project.
For those who get to listen to it, I hope you enjoy it.
Oh my goodness we finally made it! Don’t get me wrong, it was fun to think about what the news might look like in a futuristic cyberpunk world, but that was stressful. My groupmates were done with their sections of the radio show by about Wednesday, and I was panicking and scrambling to keep up with them. I hope I gave them enough time for editing. I think it’ll end up nice and I’m glad I worked with them. I made two daily creates this week and my portion of the radio show. I wrote it and recorded and edited it on Audacity, merging it with my intro. The entire script was spoken in one take, and errors were edited out.
And here is my pride and joy, along with its transcript. (keep in mind the transcript was originally written for me, so there may be grammar errors)
Introduction: Welcome to ds106 radio in Chicago. We have headlines, alerts, and forecast. Now back to your host for the weather, and as always, thank you for listening.
Transcript: It’s 8 am in Chicago today and roughly 10 sol for any listeners from the Mars colony. It looks like a sunny day today, only thing obstructing the sun right now being the smog, which is predicted to dissipate starting at roughly 12 pm today as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is powering on their atmospheric filtration systems they’ve set up all around the city. As a reminder, the national oceanic and atmospheric administration has issued the following warning: Please refrain from touching, moving, or attempting to enter the atmospheric filtration systems. Do not stand within 15 feet of any filtration device while active, especially if you are pregnant, elderly, or with small children. The mayor wishes to remind everyone that until the atmospheric filtration systems have been deactivated, no one is allowed on the roof of any building in the city of Chicago. The high for today will be a warm 68 degrees with a low of 51, another record breaker for this week. Our current Air Quality Index is up to 113 today, so respirators are not needed for outside activity. And do keep in mind this number is expected to go down in coming the hours after the filtration systems are activated.
Coming up next, police are investigating recent reports of robots traversing through abandoned subway tunnels. This behavior is considered emergent, as there has not been any evidence to suggest that the robots are communicating or have communicated with people about this. Emergent behavior in machines is when they act in a new way outside of their programming. This has become much more common since the singularity, leading scientists to believe robots are capable of much more than they let on. As for travelling underground, computer engineers believe this strange behavior may involve their pathfinding software, with one stating, “They may have made a calculation that using the old tunnels is faster than walking through crowds, so they may be testing that hypothesis.” It is of note that robots are typically spotted going underground in pairs, and this is not thought to be a dangerous behavior at this time. Even still, the police recommend that you do not follow them, as the tunnels are dangerous and cave ins could occur at any moment.
Now, as a follow up for the previous story from last week when a local high school was under an active shooter alert. The armed assailants who took the hostages did release the victims unharmed, but have yet to be found themselves. The current suspects are believed to attend this high school and will be tried as adults. The motivation for this crime is still unknown, and it is unknown if the hostages had any relation to the perpetrators. The police are still on a manhunt for the two suspects, and have taken potential accomplices in for questioning. This case is unusual because of the EMP attack, which prevented the recording of any evidence as the crime took place. Police Chief Owen Andrews stated, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had to rely on witness testimony, but we will get to the bottom of this and bring justice to the victims and their families.”
And last up on our list is a heartwarming story. ‘A cuddly pile of kittens are saved’! An anonymous donation of one million dollars to the One Tail At A Time adoption center has prevented the destruction of the East Wing, where stray cats are housed. Recently, the adoption center had put up statements on their website about financials, and the very real possibility that they would have to tear down or close off the east wing. Thanks to this kind soul, who is rumored to be singer and songwriter Casanova, One Tail at a Time will continue to rescue and house stray cats and rehabilitate them before putting them up for adoption. Staff hopes this mysterious donor steps forward so they can be thanked in person.
This week was chill. From Daily Creates to the Radio Show, I was able to check everything off my to-do list, with time to spare!
Daily Creates
This week, I got an early start on the Daily Creates. I did Sunday’s and Monday’s and both were easy and fun.
Sunday’s Daily Create was to create the 4th law of robots. To make my response for this, I had to research what the first 3 robot laws were. The understanding I was getting of the rules was that they are there to protect the human and the robots. I felt like they covered the bases with that so I tried to add a comedic twist. I said “a robot may not imitate humans (hence the “I am not a robot” question)” I also took inspiration from Sarah Honeychurch’s response to this prompt which was “A robot must enhance human creativity, and not seek to replicate it.” I loved this response because there are very few things I hate more than AI art. Not only is it bad for the environment, but it looks ugly. Hopefully my rule will prevent AI art because AI uses examples of real art to train itself.
Monday’s prompt was to make digital dust. Normally I try not to spend more than 15 minutes on a Daily Create, but I’m willing to bend this rule when I’m really enjoying the prompt. I found the digital dust to be really fun. The first 10 minutes were me playing around with the website and determining how to use it. I spent probably about another 10 or 15 minutes making the prompt. I kept messing around with it until I felt like I had gotten a cool outcome. Here is my result, I think it looks best when you go to view and change the color to Velocity Direction.
Comments
This week was tough to find things to comment on, however I was still able to get 5 comments done. The first comment I left was on Sunday and it was under Sarah Honeychurch’s Daily Create. As I mentioned earlier, I really liked her response and I wanted to let her know. I said “Best answer. No topping this one.” I stand by my comment because, as I mentioned before, I hate AI art. I think there are pros and cons to AI usage in any other context, but I really struggle to find a good thing about AI art. Moving on to a happier note, the next thing I commented on was DS106’s Radio Logo. I said “I really like this logo. The neon effect looks good, especially against the cloudy night sky; it makes the visual pop! I also think the neon effect adds to the TechNoir aesthetic.” I thought their logo came out very nice and I loved the contrast of the design to the background! Next, I commented on Rylie’s Riveting Region’s Week 1 Radio Progress. I was interested to see how other groups were doing in their process and I was happy to see Rylie say it was going well, I commented, “I really like this progress report and I love your title for it. Very silly.” The title was “Is This Thing On? Oh, It’s Not Yet?” and I thought that was very funny. After that, I commented on Live it Up With Liv’s Week 2 Radio Progress. I already had an idea of how her progress was going since I’m in her group but I wanted to read her blog too. She gave all her group members shoutouts for being the best, so I commented, “You’re the best too! I feel so lucky to have gotten such great groupmates! It made this project so much easier.” Our process has not been an easy one but we’ve been kind to each other throughout it and it has made for such a positive experience. Lastly, I commented on Cinder’s Daily Create for Hidden Faces. They talked about the hidden faces in wall outlets so I commented “When I was little, I came up with stories on why the sockets were sad. I remembered wondering why the creators didn’t make them smile.” Additionally some outlets also have a little slit on the left “eye” and I always thought that looked like an eyelash.
Radio Show
The process of our Radio Show this week was tough. The majority of the process was smooth. We met on Monday to work on scripting the show. We all collaborated on the beginning, end, and outline of the show, but each person individually crafted a question to ask and an answer from their character. Personally, this week, I worked on adjusting the background music in my advertisement based on some constructive criticism I received. I think it sounds better now, and hopefully others will agree, you can view it here.
I also created the outro for the show which I pulled from the ending of our intro. I’ve seen other podcasts do this, most notably TMG studios with Cody Ko’s laugh before they took it out. You can view the Fearless Femmes outro here.
We recorded on Wednesday but about an hour after we left the podcast studio, we found out our file was corrupted so we had to rerecord it on Thursday. The rerecording went well, the only thing that’s a bummer is I feel our first version was more authentic. That being said, I am happy with our finished product, and I am very thankful that my group members and I worked so well together. You can read more about our trials and triumphs here and listen to our podcast here!
Other than the very unfortunate accident with the corrupted files, this week was easy. I’m glad my group was able to recover quickly enough so that the rerecording didn’t put a damper on the rest of the week. This assignment worked out better than I thought it would. I enjoyed the little aspects of creating the show, and I enjoyed getting to know the people in my group. Hopefully next week will be just as good.
Our group was working too well, we had to hit a bump somewhere.
My group, which consists of me, Liv, Martina, Macie, and Kristen, had a really strong start to the week. We met on Monday afternoon to start working on our script. We already had some ideas from the last time we met, so at that point it was a matter of organizing ideas and putting them in the script. We also realized we didn’t have an outro so we determined that we would use the end of our intro as a short outro. In our radio show, there are 4 questions and 4 long answers with people chiming in. Each person except Liv was tasked with writing a question, and each person except Macie was tasked with coming up with a response. I left the meeting feeling good about our show and recording it.
Wednesday came around, and we all showed up to the DKC podcast studio to record. Recording went great, we had almost no trouble setting everything up or saying our lines, and we all left the studio confident with our product. That was until, tragedy struck… Martina texted us saying that the audio files were corrupted and they didn’t save properly. It was such a disappointment because, like I said, it was a successful take. However, we didn’t dwell on the disappointment for too long and instead went into problem solving mode. We figured out a time that works the best for everyone and settled on 4. Not the most ideal time because Macie had to leave by 4:30 and Liv had to leave at 5 to go out of town, but the studio was reserved before that so we had to make do.
In the mean time, that Wednesday Night, I fixed the audio in my ad. I received a note saying to turn up the background music and I agreed with the critique. I went into Adobe Audition and messed with the volume for each track. Here is the final result.
The next thing I worked on was crafting the outro. This was a really simple process because I already had that line singled out when I was making the intro. All I had to do was create a new project on Adobe Audition and cut the clip in the right parts. Here is the finished outro.
When Thursday rolled around we headed to the podcast studio again to record. This time we had a better idea of what we were doing and how the podcast was going to work, but I think that we lost some of the authenticity that came with running through it the first time. However, I believe that there is no point in comparing the two versions since we can’t get the first one back. The new one is still good and that’s all that matters. Martina edited together everything, and she did a great job especially with the limited time we had. You can listen to our finished show here!
I feel very fortunate to have lucked out with my group. I was nervous that I would end up in a nightmare group, but instead it was the opposite. Everyone worked hard on their assignments and I think our show came out so good! I even found out I have an in person class with Macie which was a surprise! So, thank you Liv, Martina, Kristen, and Macie for a great experience!
This week was going smoothly, we met at the beginning on the week to get into the depths of our project. We created a script and added the specifics of what we wanted to say as a framework. At first we thought it would be difficult to stay in the technoir theme but I was not that difficult. We used elements of things we have spoken about in class or themes we found in the movies discussed as jumping off points for our podcast. Then we individually added elements of stories or interruptions and general information that we wanted to talk about.
We scheduled a time to meet in the DKC on Wednesday and before that we made sure our script was ready so if people wanted to read from the script it was ready as well as make editing a little easier. I knew the DKC would be a good option because we are a larger group and we wanted to have the best sound quality. When we got to the DKC, we took a bit of time to get ready and understand how we would record and when certain people should speak. After recording we felt really good about it, I knew that it would be easier for me to edit the podcast, even though multiple people offered to help it seemed more difficult to have different pieces edited by different people. Once we were done I went to the UC to start editing the file I had uploaded was corrupted and I bang to panic, it was a half hour long podcast that went really well. I went back to the HCC but the file had been deleted so I texted the group chat with my update and we were all available to re-record this Thursday. I was a little worried that after Wednesday we would not be able to replicate our first trial but fortunately I think we did a little better. We were more comfortable with the mics and the podcast flowed a little better, I think we were also able to have better conversation. This time while filming we stopped recording multiple times to have smaller clips so that way they would easily upload and not get lost while being uploaded.
After that I went straight to editing, I wanted to take on the responsibility because I have premier pro which is a great software to be able to edit audio and videos. I also knew it would not take me long to edit because I am used to uploading and editing. I asked the other member of my group to upload the bumpers and commercials into the script so I would be able to see exactly where everything was meant to go. We then tried to find a sound we would use for each caller but when I got to editing it didn’t mix well so I chose a different one from pixa bay. we also decided against background music as we realized that a lot of podcast don’t really have music in the back.
Once I got all parts saved on my laptop it was time to edit. I listed to each part and put them in the order we had decided and then mixed the audios so that the commercials, intro and bumpers all sounded well together. As the bumpers, intros and commercials were all done last week the bulk of the editing was put into making everything sound good. It did get tiring listening to my own voice but it wasn’t too bad.
This week was a lot of compiling our final radio show. Last week we has split the tasks so that we were all doing a fair amount of work. Our main idea was to create a new broadcast. This way we can use all our characters and make a cohesive show while still having individual aspects.
My broadcast was based in Philadelphia and my class character, Natasha Slayer, was the news reporter. I created two stories with a tech noir theme to try and tie this all into the main theme of the class. The stories talked about different cyber uprisings and chaos in the city. In addition to the two news stories I also contributed a commercial to my group. Although this strays from the tech noir theme I chose to make a Dunkin Donuts commercial. I used Audacity to create this using my voice and other background sounds/ music.
Maddie in my group will be compiling all of our recordings into one clip to make the completed show (shoutout Maddie!!).
Lastly for this week, I did two daily creates. The first one I did was the image to image cat creation. I drew a house and generated an image where the drawing was filled in with a cat. I’m not sure if that’s exactly what the prompt was asking me to do but i thought it was silly so i kept it. The second one I did was the tell us what you love. I chose a picture of the beach that I live at. It represents more than just my love of the beach but also home and my family which I love more than anything. Summer is my favorite and spending time on the beach.
was so wonderful to complete the editing for us. She said she had a really nice program to use, and her editing skill set is far more advanced than any of the rest of ours (I think). Martina did an outstanding job on editing, and we are all so appreciative of her hard work and help with this entire project!! Today is Friday, and we are proudly turning it in. 
