This week was chaos for me, lots of personal stuff happening along with a ton of school stuff and I can’t believe I was able to do it. So, what did we do this week:
First this week was to download Audacity and set up a sound cloud account. I couldn’t do this until Tuesday so that made my week hellacious. But I was able to do it and I will say, audacity is cool. Along with the free sound web pages, I might continue to mess with that after the class is done. I might make some funny videos or songs with my kids or something. Either way, it is a great outlet for that style of creativity. And of course, SoundCloud is SoundCloud.
The next task was to watch Jad Abumrad’s videos on how radio creates empathy and how radio is storytelling magic. We also listened to an audio track called Moon Graffiti that was essentially a what if story on if the moon landing had failed. All three of these were interesting but I particularly liked Moon Graffiti. It was dark and compelling and fell right into my niche of sci-fi horror, but in a slightly different way. We also did a group radio listen of DS106 radio. It was interesting to think about the Jad Abumrad videos while we were doing this and sort of starting to connect the dots he was talking about. I was only able to make it to the first session, but I will go listen to the whole thing the next chance I get. Here is my post about all 3.
Our next task was to create a radio bumper for DS106 radio. This was fun since I had to think about the last time I even listened to radio and what a bumper would even sound like. Seriously I have been listening to Spotify almost exclusively since like 2012. Here is my post about it.
I also did an interesting sound effect story. This was my first real deep dive into audacity, so it took me a while to get going. When I finally did, the ideas started flowing. I don’t want to spoil it too much so, if you want to hear it, here is my post.
I also did 3 sound assignments this week. I interviewed Dr. Oblivion for his current job (he was very snarky), I made a breaking news story video/audio clip, and I made a sick beat with my daughter. All of them were really fun, but I have to give it to my daughter, her song slapped! This part of the weekly due-outs is usually my favorite. I get to go into the repository and pick anything that not only feels doable, but also is something I am interested in learning a bit more about.
Of the daily creates I was able to do this week, I think the one on the silk app was the most fun. Takes me back to spirograph art as a kid but now it’s added technology! Here is my post about what I did.
Finally, was the radio show idea. This took me a while because I really want this to be entertaining and interesting and maybe even though provoking. I decided that a podcast style discussion show would be a great forum to display my character and his thoughts and motivations. I chose other characters from the list that I thought would either compliment my character well or provide interesting tension to draw out those other characteristics. The post with the details is here.
Wow that week was a lot of learning and a lot of work, but I can breathe a sigh of relief after this post. Sound design is definitely not my strong suit, but I have added a lot of skills to my repertoire and intend to keep moving forward.