This radio commercial came out of an assignment that requested the creation of a commercial advertising a product we would like others to know about. In order to work this into my group’s radio show, I made a commercial for my character, Danny Keys, whose only real goods and services is his piano-playing. So, I figured who doesn’t like a good piano lesson?

I may have cheated with the audio a bit on this project. Instead of compiling audio from Freesound, I went ahead and used an audio clip from Purple Planet, which has royalty free music available for free download and usage with the appropriate credit. The background music in this commercial is their “Piano Bar” composition, which was too perfect to pass up for this assignment. I would love to be able to make this kind of musical mix at some point, but for now I thought it would just be more productive to use the resources available to me. The composition was layered with the spoken piece in Audacity.

I chose to create a radio commercial in honor of my character, Mrs. Dean, who is a hardworking homesteader’s wife. She not only works out in the fields with her husband, but she cooks, cleans, and knits and washes clothing in the home, because being a homesteader is an extremely self sufficient job. I created a Western Boutique as a place to treat herself. She always works so hard to support her family and she deserves to be paid back for that sometimes. Hopefully her family will hear this ad and want to splurge on her.

For my boutique, I thought of a name for my store and then I wrote out a script. I chose to play an instrumental version of Taylor Swift’s popular song “You Belong With Me.” I wanted to play this song in the background, because it is very western sounding with a little girly edge. It would really help promote my cute little boutique.