Original DS106 Assignment: Story Time Fun Time (3.5 stars)

A story based on events! An on going investigation of what happened to Muffin. Did she escape? Is she under the couch? Will I get her back?

Step 1: Open Audacity. Record your original story to add as the first audio with the red “Record” button.

Step 2: Go to freesound.org to get some audios that best suit your story. On the search bar enter key words like “dramatic” “sad” “scared.” Sometimes you have to go through multiple pages, but there definitely are great variations there.

Step 3: Import audio to Audacity by going to File > Import > Selecting Audio.

Step 4: Adjust! The story is going to be lead by where the audio is, how it starts and end, and the mood it creates around the story. To get more knowledge on how to do this, watch this video along with others linked underneath it to see how it’s done.!

Step 5: Export to your computer & upload or share to where you want! More customization comes here with photo covers, names, or where you want to share it.

For my final assignment, I chose to start working on building my story for the radio show with the Story Fun Time! Assignment (3.5 stars). I was first thinking about using a conversation for the story, but then I remembered that my characters are Irish and my Irish accent is horrid… I then decided to create a story as a storyteller incorporating sounds. The ad I created actually helped me to further develop the story I wanted to tell. I knew I wanted it to be about Ella and her mother. I am now realizing looking at the image I used for the story on SoundCloud, that the name I went with initially for Ella’s mother was Geraldine, but I have been using Gwendolyn all week… This is definitely a lesson in consistency in storytelling… The more I continue to add to the story, the harder it is to keep all of the details straight. I am creating an imaginary world for my character and want it to be consistent in details. Maybe next time I work with the character, I will work on addressing Geraldine Gwendolyn Maguire’s name. Her first name is Geraldine but a lot of the time she goes by her middle name, Gwendolyn. I think it’s a pretty name!

To create this story, I first wrote out the story I wanted to tell about Ella and her mother, putting in parenthesis the sounds I wanted to try to find. I recorded the different parts of the story in iMovie and then went to YouTube Audio Files to find sound effects or songs I could use between them. I realized that the story was still shorter than I wanted it to be, so I decided to bite the bullet and start practicing my Irish accent. I now realize that I did not finish reading the entire story I wrote. I stopped after one of the pauses for a sound effect, which is probably why it was so short. I ended up using the dialogue to say what I said in the rest of the story I forgot to record but in a more interesting way, so it ended up not mattering. I will say I have had trouble this week finding time when my roommate is not in the room to record myself!

I wrote up what I wanted the dialogue to be, practiced the accents, and then went for it. The accents did not turn out being as bad as I would have expected, and I think it got easier as I went. I still do not think they were great, but the effort was there. I also tried to make Ella’s voice somewhat higher than her mom’s to differentiate the characters while still giving them Irish accents… I also think some lines were more successful than others with this. At the end of the day, though, it was fun recording myself and trying out the different accents. It was a challenge but a fun one!

After I finished recording myself, I played around with the arrangement of the different sounds and recordings of my voice. I decided that I did not want sound effects during the conversation. There were not any that seemed to fit. I did want to add music at the end, so I added both the Star Spangled Banner and the Happy Haunts songs I used earlier in the story together to create a cool effect. I then added a different part of the Happy Haunts song, than the one I had already used in the story, as an intro in the beginning. I then went through and worked on volume consistency across the different songs and recordings. I also faded some of the songs out at the beginning or end to make transitions smoother. Eventually, I listened through the whole story and liked it, so I downloaded it from iMovie and uploaded it to SoundCloud. I got to use the design I created for another assignment as the image for the story! This assignment was challenging but fun! I definitely enjoyed it!

For the first 3.5 stars out of the 12 needed for our Audio Assignments, I completed the storytime audio assignment. This had to tie back into our alternate history choice in some way, shape, or form. For my alternative history, I decided to take a look at what would happen if the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into an all-out war.

The first thing I did was download Audacity and the LAME mp3 Encoder to go with it. I spent quite a while figuring out how Audacity worked and learning all of it’s secrets. Next I went to freesound to get some audio clips for my project. I tried to tell the story of a war ending in a nuclear explosion. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I found this clip of someone reading off casualty reports for World War II and decided to use it for my “World War III”. I feel like that final clip really tied it all together in a nice, little bow.

Hello, everyone! This is the story of what it might be like if The Beatles never broke up (based on the alternate history story I told, last week):

I grabbed all of the sounds and the music from Freesound.org and the Free Music Archive, with the exception of my own voice, which I recorded on my computer using a plug-in microphone. I recorded my voice over in my computer’s pre-installed voice recording software, and that and all of the background tracks were edited in Audacity. Each paragraph of my script was its own (series of) individual takes, which were then edited together into one singular track in Audacity.

I wanted to make mention of the fact that The Beatles’ music would most likely continue to evolve, throughout the decades, and how audiences might react to their continuous evolution, with some criticizing them for always changing their sound, and others defending them for their experimentation, but I wasn’t sure how to convey that through only sound and no dialogue, so I decided to marry the two. I used the same music cue at the very beginning and the very end to add some tonal consistency, as well as little samples of instruments and crowds cheering in places (the latter of which I looped three times) to illustrate certain points. I wanted to avoid using actual Beatles songs, for fear of being blocked for copyright, which is why I used free, public-domain tracks.

I also tried to avoid using the first-person, in my narration, to ensure that the story sounded like it was being told by an omniscient and unbiased narrator, like the stories told by The Truth podcast, which I listened to, earlier this week. At first, however, I did think about using the first-person to make it seem like I, the narrator, was actually experiencing this alternate reality–I talked about how I was hyped for The Beatles’ next album, set to drop some time in the fall of this year, and that I would ask for it for my birthday–but in the end, I decided against it.

Like I feared, recording my lines was one of the hardest parts; most of the paragraphs required multiple takes, often because I either stumbled over words or in some cases I thought I sounded drunk! I definitely need more practice reciting lines, especially since I want to do online reviews someday, as a hobby, which will of course require me to read lines off of a script. In the end, though, I am mostly satisfied with the final results of my narration, as well as the track, as a whole.

The last required assignment for the third week was Story Time Fun a 3 1/2 star assignment, which was linked to our previous Alternative History assignment. Last week I had to actually change my assignment (giving me more work to do) because I noticed that I couldn’t do much creatively. I’ve since realized that my original answer to the question of the week was perfect. For my original alternative history, I wrote about eliminating racism and discrimination. What if these things had never existed? The process of creating an audio story was difficult at first and frustrating. I decided to give myself a break and when I did the inspiration struck. I found an audio clip on the free sound website that spoke about elements of the past and life that had fit into my idea for the assignment.

The audio clip is blank minutes and it starts off with the voice addressing friends. As this person is speaking you can hear footsteps indicating that someone is walking along the path. Once you get further into this audio file international music begins to play. I decided to use clips from ethnic music found on Free Music Archive. Throughout this story, I have used the same music but have split it up to play in the middle and at the very end. I wanted this piece to feel like you were taking a journey into the past and taking a glimpse of a culture that was once celebrated. Then towards the end, you are able to embrace who you actually are.

Advice from a fellow peer helped me tremendously when it came to editing my audio file. I had to find another audio editing program that would work on my computer which ended up being the Beautiful Audio Editor. Before beginning, I listened to all of the audio files multiple times and annotated the parts that I wanted to use. Once all of the files were trimmed I uploaded them to the Beautiful Audio Editor where I was able to manipulate their placement and volume. I was able to stretch some of my audio files to increase the length. Overall, I am satisfied with the result of my story. The track is two minutes and seven seconds long.

For this assignment I decided to try my best and create a sample of what Elvis might be doing if he was still alive. I thought that if he were here he would most likely do a collaboration with Demi Lovato. I feel like if he were still here, he would have fought and won against his drug addiction. He also would come out stronger. I think that he would have reached out to Demi who went through a similar struggle and that they would have created something similar, but sounds better, to this.

For this it starts with the words of one of Demi’s song that I cut and put together to try and make it seem like he was singing. I feel like if I had autotune it would have worked better. After hearing Elvis for a white Demi Comes in to finish it. I feel like this song would be a big hit if it was real and sounded better!

When telling this story about a hellish post-apocalyptic land, rather than trying to tell a grand sweeping story, I decided to make it a more down to earth tale. To that end, I decided to tell this story from the perspective of a lone traveler, a young man who has never experienced the world before the cataclysmic event left it in it’s current state. I tried my best to convey how the protagonist feels about his current situation, that although he knows he must keep going, he is starting to lose hope with each passing day, and longs for the world to return to the supposedly Utopian state it was in before the apocalypse. The reason I made these creative decisions was because I wanted to make a story that was grounded in reality so that the viewers could easily put themselves into this same situation, and I believe that this young man’s thoughts are an accurate representation of how most of us would respond if we were to be thrust into the same position as him.

https://soundcloud.com/user-397749399/the-journey