This assignment in pretty simple, yet very powerful. Mash-up your own work! Take at least 3 things you’ve done this semester, and combine them together to make one cohesive thing.
My third and final mashup assignment for this grading period is worth four stars exactly at the time that this post goes up. Entitled “Mash Thyself, Before Ye Trash Thyself,” my entry for this challenge consists of five separate audio clips created over the course of this semester. The clips in question are my article on wedding rings; my “Egyptian” bumper; my “Trump Nektar” commercial; a second ad, which updates the “How Many Licks” ad campaign that immortalized Tootsie Roll Pops in the eyes of kids for 45 years now; and a second article – on dentures and dental implants – cobbled together from the recordings I sent to my teammates during that particular grading period.
As for the story of this remix, it’s a makeshift episode of the Wacky History podcast I wrote a portion of the script for, as part of my mid-term exam for DS106. Basically, I wanted to provide an abridged version of the podcast I was a part of, the way I, for the most part, originally envisioned it. The first half of my “minisode,” on wedding rings, remains untouched, as are most of the clips in this remix; in fact, the only real edit I make here is cutting my short monologue on dental implants to make room for the unedited George Washington follow-up, before closing both the segment and the entire “podcast” with the remaining audio from the aforementioned “Implants” portion.
With regards to scheduling, the “minisode” opens with my segment on wedding rings, before cutting to a “commercial break” consisting of my “How Many Licks” parody, followed by “Trump Nektar;” we then hear the “Egyptian” bumper before completing the abridged podcast with a segment on dentures and dental implants. Once again, I basically took old footage from this last semester, and spliced them together using Audacity to make this “minisode,” mostly by aligning the various tracks so they all start the second the previous one stops, but also by cutting out any excess footage to make the final product run as smoothly as possible, something that was especially true when I edited my segment on dentures.
This mashup was made with the central goal of showing my intentions for the mid-term – providing listeners with the zany backstories of household objects – as well as showing how versatile I can be in terms of editing, as the audio goes from Radiolab in the first half of the podcast to This American Life in the second. Overall, the sudden shift in tone definitely provides a feeling of unpredictability within the podcast, as everything in life, including history, can and will be unpredictable.
This project, as bizarre as it is, is an experiment on two different styles of editing, to see which one worked better for me, and to make a long story short, I think I like both. This is essentially a split of personalities for me: I tend to keep things straight and narrow for dentures and implants, and I give my listeners twists and turns for wedding rings. The final product is a work of modern abstract art, something that really has to be seen – or heard – just to be believed.
As always, once I was satisfied with what I had, I saved everything the way it was, exported it as its own MP3 file, and uploaded it onto my SoundCloud account, for a total of twelve stars this grading period.
