For one of my Audio Assignments I decided to do the Call Me, Beep Me assignment. This assignment involved choosing a character from a story I have read, watched, or heard during this class so far. I decided to do a call from Seong-kyeong to Sanghwa after she arrived in Busan with Su-an (Train to Busan). I know people who have dealt with loss sometimes like to call that person’s cellphone to hear their voice, so I made this going off of that. At this point she has had their baby that he named before he died – Su Yun. I added the name at the end to add a little emotion to it. I’m not a great actor, so this was really weird to do for me, but it was a lot of fun to do.

For this recording I had done my voice recording for the call (unfortunately, I don’t speak Korean, so this was in English). I also added Korean voices in the background. These voices were left purposefully loud since they are supposedly in a military base with survivors of a zombie apocalypse – I doubt it’s quiet there. I also added the sounds of a baby babbling towards the end of the call to add some more emotion to the end of the call. I figure if the deceased Sanghwa heard the call, it would have meant a lot to him to be able to hear his baby.

I chose the character Seong-kyeong to do since I related to her the most in the movie. While I am not a mother, I can relate to the feeling of wanting to protect. I can’t really relate to the feeling of helplessness she probably felt as a pregnant woman running for her life during a zombie apocalypse, but I did feel a great amount of sympathy for her. This is why I chose her character. I felt bad for her to have lost her husband that way and it was overall very sad for her. I wanted to have some sort of personal closure for her and her husband through the call.

Finis is a short story I read at the beginning of the semester for this class, and I loved it a lot. I particularly loved the character Alice and how she told the audience that, now that her life was ending, she wishes she would have lived more. I loved this because I think all the time I should live more in the moment.

When I created this assignment, I wanted to make it something for students to pick any character that has resonated with them this semester and embody them in an audio recording. I chose Alice because her story fascinated me, and I always wish she would have been a bigger character in Finis. This was my way of continuing her story.

At the end of the story she proclaims that she wishes she would have lived more, and chooses to live her final moments completely giving herself to Eastwood, not thinking about what could happen, but just embracing him and feeling loved. I wanted to depict that in this recording.

I also chose to input sounds of thunderstorms because they talk about all of the terrible storms in the play that come as a result of the new sun.

Here is my recording as Alice:

For this assignment I decided to be the little boy from ” The Road”. He finds a house and the phone is working so he dials 911 and requests help because Papa is dead on the beach and he does not know what to do.  You can listen here.

I thought the little boy would be perfect for this assignment its a little short but it seems fine to me. I did a 2nd recording to add some background to the kids character in the movie. Click here to listen.

For my second audio star assignment, I chose the three and a half star assignment, Call Me, Beep Me. I had to make a 911 call, and I chose to relate it to the Peoria Plague radio show from Wednesday night. I found it a little tricky to record myself as the 911 operator and as the caller, but eventually I made it work. I decided to make the call as someone who was not infected by the “plague” in the hospital. To create a different voice for the 911 operator, I edited the pitch to be lower, so it could seem like I was recording with someone else. I added a loud scared crowd sound, from freesound.org and repeated it throughout the call. I had to cut little bits of it so it would not sound abrupt from one loop to another.

For those of you who tuned in to DS106 radio on Wednesday, I hope you agree that this relates well to the original story. I had fun creating the audio, and I cannot wait to learn more about editing and different tools so my audio quality can improve in the future.