In a very productive edition of audio assignments, I was instructed to make a radio commercial for an 80’s product. This actually worked out perfectly because for my upcoming group radio show assignment, we need to have commercials, so this gave me an opportunity to multipurpose my work to achieve two goals. For some reason whenever it comes to anything where I need to record my voice with no picture, I immediately jump to the idea of a corny joke style. Still no clue why, but I’m not complaining because it feels like it works out well. I went into it with the idea of going part retro feeling, part jokey, part nonsense. I think it came out the other end lining up pretty accurately with me preconceived notion. I used Audacity to record myself voicing the lines for my walkman commercial, then added in the music and noises afterwords. Although the first version of a walkman came out late 1979, it is one of the most iconic pieces of 80’s tech out there. And as you will find out, you cant spell cool without w-a-l-k-m-a-n.

For this assignment, for 5 stars, I wanted to do an assignment that could link in with our radio show project. Here, I did an 80’s lawn commercial. Using a royalty-free add my group members and I found from websites online, I did the one that I felt would be entertaining and funny for our show. It depicts a man advertising for a lawn company, saying it’s the best he’s ever had. I memorized the script, then took to audacity to recite it. I used freesounds.com as usual, because I love that website so much, to add some 80’s pop audio before and after the commercial. Overall, it took a few tries to get it the way I wanted it, but overall it was a fun project and also one we will be able to use in our radio show. I uploaded the link to Soundcloud which I will embed below.

This next assignment was to create a 30-45 second 80’s product commercial. I decided to do one on the Etch A Sketch 2000 which was super popular among the kids and even teens of the 80’s. I used Audacity with my voice to create this commercial and edited my voice to sound like the different characters in the commercial. This assignment is worth 5 stars and I am going to be able to use it with my radio show project these weeks.

This was a pretty straight forward assignment that just required a quiet room and Audacity to create the files and export them as a MP3.

I am pretty happy with how this turned out, it is true to the 80’s and how they were with advertising as well as relationships between consumer and distributor. This was a fun assignment to create because I got to use my creativity to make this commercial fun and exciting while pretending to be a kid.

For this assignment, I wanted to create a commercial that would work with my group’s radio show idea. Our idea was to talk about products, trends, and characters that made an impact at the time. So to create a commercial for straw fedora hats like the one Sam (Molly Ringwald) wore in Sixteen Candles.

When I was creating the scripts, I tried to pepper in some 80s slang, but it was much harder than I thought. It all sounds very forced so I’ll have to work on that.

One aspect I do like is that I found some cool, jazzy music that had an 80s vibe and I used it for the intro.

Overall, I like how it turned out. I do think there’s room for improvement, but I’m not too stressed about it. It was my first try and I think it’s pretty good for a first try!

Here we have another audio challenge! For this assignment, you needed to create a 30-45 second radio commercial for a product from the 80s. My product is… the Atari!!

I had a lot of fun mixing together arcade-setting audio, and also messing around with different audio effects to change my voice. All in all, this was a fun experience.

Hope you enjoy! Below, you can find details on the assignment itself:

This assignment I did is one I created called 80’s Product Radio Commercial where you must create a 30-45 second radio commercial for a product from the 80’s and add some background music and/or sound effects to make it sound like a real radio commercial. I created this assignment for the purposes of creating content for my group’s DS106 radio show project. The product I chose to do a commercial for is Jelly Shoes because they were very popular in the 80’s and seemed to have emerged in the 80’s. Therefore, it goes along with the 80’s theme. For the content of the commercial, I mentioned great qualities about Jelly Shoes such as how they are breathable, lightweight, and comfortable. The difficult part for me was trying to find the right background music with the right vibe to match the vibe of the commercial. So, I ended up using some upbeat synthesizer music from Freesound to give the commercial a positive vibe and to go along with the 80’s theme. Lastly, I laid everything out the way I wanted to using Audacity. Overall, I enjoyed getting to create a radio commercial, and it is something I have never done before, so it was nice to try. Check out my radio commercial below.