so the goal of this assignment was to be Super Open about your past & share a diary entry from when you were an angsty teen. However! in light of our current radio show project! i decided to dramatically read snippets of Winston (from 1984)’s diary! And honestly? the end result is really really good, if i do say so myself!
So what i did was open up a free online pdf of the book (interested?) & use the “find” feature on google to look for whenever the word “wrote” appears. This led me to all of the times in which Winston wrote in his diary. I copied them all into a word document with the intention of reading all of them for the upload. However, upon attempting a dramatic reading of some of the longer entries, I realized that it was a little bit boring and irrelevant. Thus, I decided to pick and choose the entries that i thought showed Winston’s progression through the novel, from a man full of rage with nowhere to put it, to a critically reflecting outcast, then to an ideal member of the party machine. Once I decided on the diary bits i wanted included, I took a couple takes in the vocal recording booth & spliced and edited into a final product that i’m happy with.
Overall I think this turned out really well, and I liked trying to show Winston character development through just tone of voice and words. I did struggle with figuring out what to cut, however. For example, the very first entry in Winston’s diary is a monologue of a war movie he saw, and I think it encapsulates how, at the beginning of the novel, he was A Little Different from everybody else, but still pretty heavily conditioned/under Big Brother’s thumb. I realized I had to cut it, however, because it was a very lengthy entry that just didn’t contribute enough to the progression to be worth keeping.
reflect critically on authority, -liz
