As a contribution to my group’s radio show and the five points of character assignments this week, I decided to complete the “DS106 Radio Commercial”. However, instead of inventing a product for a movie or TV show character, I fabricated one for my own character, “Jewel”. The prompt states: Create a commercial featuring an item … Continue reading NO-NV Does the Trick!
So we have audacity and save file as MP3 for a bumper about our radio station. We are Noir We There Yet? or NWTY. This assignment was fun and I enjoy putting the track together and picking music but I still don’t like hearing my own voice. I love how audacity pulls these together into one track. I have experimented with as many as seven at one time and still come out with a cool sound in the end.
My character is a part of our radio show so this bumper for our station is in a bar setting with a piano playing. And of course advertising our awesome radio station ID.
I picked the piano music because it is from the time frame and seemed very noir to me as I was looking and found this tune. Of course my character is noir to me also especially combined with this setting. I attempted to make my voice sound, well I don’t really know! That was the hardest part was to sound like a noir woman from back then. If didn’t repeat the words twenty times I didn’t say it once! Still not to my liking but I don’t think I will ever like to hear my own voice.
I had a lot of fun coming up with this assignment. I wanted to connect it with our upcoming radio show, so I based it around cats because two of the main characters of the show own cats. This Audio Assignment is the“ds106 Radio Commercial” where you have to create an item that would be useful for my favorite TV show or movie character, but I adapted it to fit my noir character.
This commercial will most likely appear in our group radio show and I feel that it fits into the context of the story. My favorite audio I found was the happy piano music made by setuniman on freesound because I could just imagine cute animals being in a commercial with that music in the background. I also used cat audio clips from steffcaffrey and dobroide and my own voice clip made on Audacity. I’m really happy with how the cat sounds at the beginning lined up with notes from the piano audio and that the piano audio doesn’t cover up my voice because I lowered the volume of the audio track. The hardest part of this assignment was just figuring out how to get the message of the product across in a small amount of time. The cat background I found also matches up with the product pretty well. Now everyone will know of the joy that is IttyBittyKitty Shampoo!
Assignment Value: 3 stars
I’m excited to share this commercial a friend and I made that will hopefully play during NeoNoir’s radio show. It is worth three audio points for the week of 2/16 to 2/22.
We made the commercial as though it would sell to the main character of the radio show, who is an internet hacker attempting to bust crime on the deep web. The commercial is selling her a tracking device.
To make it, I first recorded my voice (with a silly, slightly vague dialect) into Audacity, without using any outside microphone. Then I found the car sounds on freesound.org and added them in. Next, my friend recorded his part, also without an extra mic. Finally, we found a song on FreeMusicArchive, slowed it down about 12%, put it underneath his vocal track, and made sure to fade it out.
The song is by Steve Combs and is called ‘Left of Center’ remix.
Creating a commercial is not as easy as you would think. For 3 stars I did the assignment entitled DS106 Radio Commercial. The task: Create a commercial featuring an item that you have invented that would be extremely useful to your favorite movie or TV Show character. Try to be as creative and abstract as possible. Must include sound effects or background music and be at least 20 seconds in length.
I was able to put these 3 stars towards Blair, and I also am going to use this in my radio show. So I really killed three birds with one stone.
The product is a dating website entitled “Killing For Love” at killingforlove.com It is basically a website for people who have killed their significant others and are trying to find love again. Blair killed her husband because he continuously cheated on her, and she really wants to find someone to help her raise her 5 children. So why not try online dating?
I started off with some background music that I found on youtube. I trimmed it to be about 30 seconds, at a spot that I thought captured the mood I was trying to give. I really liked the music and it seemed somewhat seductive.
Then came the hardest part. Coming up with what to say. I had originally come up with the site Steal Your Heart, but I couldn’t make anything catchy about it. Since I was at conference this weekend, my ARH friends helped me come up with Killing for love, and everything to say in the commercial. My friend Mike is also featured at the end of the commercial. He played the part of a love killer VERY well if you ask me, which was kind of creepy. You can also see him featured as the cover model for the commercial. After all of the speaking parts were finished, I added a gunshot from freesound.org.
Once layered together, I was quite impressed with how it came out. There are still a few editing issues, but I will work on that on future assignments.
Here is the final result!
6 stars down, 3 for Blair!
To make a ds106 radio commercial (3 pts), it took me a long time to come up with a product that I liked. Inventing a product that would be useful to my character was tricky, but I finally decided to take inspiration from Sasha Kellogg’s name and create a noir cereal. It is useful because everyone can make use of cereal! A noir cereal had to be chocolate to get the dark feel, so I added chocolate chunks to the flakes of normal cereal. I also wanted to add a “crime scene” feel, so I added raspberries as a splash of dark red. Now I had to make it unlike any other cereal out there. My radio show group, Josie and the Noir Cats” are planning on using these commercials in our show, so I decided to go with the cat theme and make the chocolate chunks into cat shapes. Voila: Kellogg’s Cocoa Kitties!
I recorded my own voice for the words, and used “Dry Thunder2″ by juskiddink and “Careful Approach” by Setuniman off of SoundCloud for the background noises. The music in the background adds to the noir feel of suspense and urgency, which hopefully marks a big enough difference with other cereal commercials that people remember it and buy the product. The thunderclap connotes rain as is so prevalent in noir shows. I also really wanted to incorporate Kellogg’s old theme “K-E Double L O Double Good Kellogg’s Best to You” because I used to watch Monkees reruns when I was younger and they always advertized Kellogg’s:
Of course, I could never sing the jingle like they do, but I say the words at the end. It timed out with the music beautifully, though, because the climax of the music happens during the jingle and becomes softer again afterwards. I hope this commercial makes you want to go out and buy Cocoa Kitties, or call up Kellogg’s and force them to create this cereal. I know Sasha Kellogg would love eating it in the morning!
For my second assignment of the week, I became a hipster. Seriously. I made a commercial about buying a new fedora. There’s probably more hipster-y things than this happening all the time, but, of course, I’ve never even heard of them.
I stared off the assignment with no idea what I would base my commercial on, but my group needed another commercial for our radio show, so I needed to get it done. Luckily, Miss Parker had her own plan. She was using an item that her character could use. So, I went back to my bag assignment and tried to find something that Donnie would need to replace sooner or later. That wasn’t very helpful, since I’d included more memorabilia than actual products–and I wasn’t about to make a commercial for a pen or journal, that would have been dryer than an Egyptian scroll. Then, I remembered I had noted in my character dossier that Donnie wore a bowler cap (I dig Charlie Chaplin), so I decided that somehow a hat commercial would be a bit better than a pen advert.
Then, I did a search for noir hats, and that yielded quite a useful Kotaku article about L.A. Noire’s hats, wherein a distinction between fedoras and trilby hats was made. I used that to start off my commercial.
Then, I did a bit of research to find some slang from hard-boiled literature, since ads can have such a long lifespan, and determined some slang would carry over. From it, I garnered terms such as “don’t be a bunny”(don’t be an idiot), jawing (talking), bangtails (racehorses), ankling (walking), and “drift with the tide” (go with the crowd).
I wrote up my script, and recorded it once to get an idea of its length, and realized I needed to add more to get a commercial longer than 60 seconds. So, I added a few more lines, and realized I needed to slow down my delivery.
I recorded the new script, put it into Audacity, and listened to it. It sounded so…eerie without background music.
I grabbed my acoustic guitar from my closet and started strumming until I came up with an extremely simple tune to use, then put that clip into Audacity and edited it into a basic loop repeating throughout. The result was this:
I was going to try to do an accent for my voice, but decided against it, thinking I’d probably forget the correct articulation of certain words.
This assignment was worth 3 stars, which I would consider in respect to my character, considering his bowler is rather outdated and is aimed at him.
Audio Assignment:
For this assignment we had to make a DS106 radio commercial. I decided to do this assignment because we’re going to have to make 3 commercials for our radio show anyways.
I made this commercial centered around my character. She works for the Boston Police Department so I figured it would be good to make a commercial to get people to join the department. I also threw in a little tidbit about the forensics department where Emma, my character, works.
For this assignment I used Audacity to record my message. I then went on Youtube to look for action music and found the background music for my message. I exported the file and uploaded it to Soundcloud. Then I embedded it into this post.
I did this 3 Star Project for the radio show. It was fun. It was my first attempt at a commercial and I think it came out good. A little corney but it was fun. I used audacity to put it together and used an ad I created during design week to decorate it. I downloaded the sounds from freesound.com even the guitar. I hope it makes you want a Grape Nehi.
3 stars http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/ds106-radio-commercial/
This assignment asked us to create a radio commercial for a favorite TV show or character of ours. I created mine for my character Melody Bay and my group’s radio show House of Noir.
My character is the mysterious women and I decided that the one “product” she would want is the one that would help disappear for a few days!
My creative process started by writing the script for the commercial in a word document. I decided to name the fictitious company Carmen Sandiego Inc. after the game with the ultimate mysterious women. The hardest part of writing this commercial was deciding on what word to put in my phone number. It had to be seven letters and reference go away somehow. I decided on the word abandon so my fake number is 1-800-abandon or 1-800-222-6366.
My last step was picking a song. I wanted something ominous and haunting so I went with my favorite cover of Don’t You Want Me by Young Summer. I heard it on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy!
