Month: February 2015

Emojination Story

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tdc1144emojinate

Daily Create 1145 : Select 5 emojis and use them as a prompt for a unique story. Screenshot your emojis and add link to your story below. If you are on Twitter then you can emojinate in one click!

I have seen this done in writing workshop at the elementary level. It really is a great way to prompt writing and get the thought process going. I chose to go with the first set of emoji that came up and they actually did pull into a decent story of what was actually going on at the time.

I went to the site, selected the first 5 icons by clicking the buttons. I then put  them into a story. Took a screen shot of the completed story and uploaded it to Flickr.

A great daily create creative starter.

Racoon Attack of the Turkey

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Racoon Attack of the Turkey! tdc1146

Daily Create 1146

Blue and orange are (still everywhere) – it’s the color combination that spells “action movie”.

Make (or modify) an image to make it suitable for an action film poster using primarily teal blue and orange hues.

Not much to say on this one. It looked like an action movie to me – so I dropped it in Snapseed and added some filters put in some orange in the background and left it at that!

Daily Create in the middle of Audio week! – Definitely keeping to the 10 minute guideline. 🙂

POST SCRIPT:

Got called out by Erin as to not writing enough for the tdc submission. 🙂

On this daily create the following was done:

  1. Read the prompt
  2. Try the links to the examples – they didn’t go anywhere 404 errors.
  3. Search for action movie posters – there sure are a lot of blue and orange tones!
  4. Try to decide if I will draw, search for someone else’s work to manipulate or see if I had something in my own Flickr files that would work.
  5. Landed on my own picture as an option.
  6. Opened it on my iPad in an app called Snapseed.
  7. Applied some different filters.
  8. Saved.
  9. Opened in Photo shop
  10. Selected the background with the lasso tool
  11. Used Edit and filled with orange – the Snapseed filters left everything too blue and green.
  12. Uploaded back to Flickr and tagged.

Not much else going on as a thought process. Went with first thoughts to keep it within a daily create scope. Trying to establish daily create in the concept of a journal or sketch journal. Thoughts, jots, creations each day that some day may grow up to be a product. The key is doing something each day that is creative and at a point in time taking those creations as pieces and creating a whole.

Thanks for the nudge Erin – you are right – this is worth the time personally for better work ahead.

Waldorf and Statler Present – Eastside

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This is my intro bumper. Since at this time I will not do a radio show as an individual I chose to make an intro to my possible audio session and not a ds106radio bumper. One of my Dad’s favorite shows was the Muppet Show. He loved Waldorf and Statler and Animal.

Searching for clips of animal turned up a lot of screaming and grunts – he was a character of few words and lots of animated action! I still may try a short 15 second bumper with Animal.

Waldorf and Statler  – It took me a while, because I knew who they were – the grumpy old men hecklers, but not their names. Once I uncovered who they were there were piles of clips to go through. And sigh…again I got caught up in watching – but not as long this time!

I found a trailer for a muppet movie that was more a conversation between the two of them and not the one liner zingers. Zingers would work -but there would have been a lot of piecing together. I think John Johnston has some script to apply to clips that I will have to check out on how to use – especially before the remix units! I still had a lot of trimming, matching, juggling and piecing to do with the dialog to get it to say what I wanted it to say.

I found several versions of the theme music for the background and went with a cover of piano only since I wanted it to be background. The music in the end sounded to me like it was part of the original and it wasn’t. This is still several pieces rearranged and tweaked to be one.

I added the text to speech voice of Ryan for the title Eastside to take out references of muppets.

Other than that this one was a little more simple and straight forward without a lot of layers and additions. The original clip had layers of sounds and – hey  – why not use them.

I did keep the ending with a long trailer – that is for the purpose of being easier to add to a longer audio event and blend it in. So the last 3+seconds are really dead air, but since they are at the end a listener will not be affected.

Any other Muppet Show fans out there? I love bringing in things that meant something to my character!

Tools: Audacity, Mac YouTube Downloader

Guys vs Dolls – Commercial Standoff

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Audio commercials. How to choose a voice? Male or Female? Who is the target audience? Which fits best? I decided to do both versions and use both within the same audio event – cover all the bases!

Audacity is getting to be more familiar and WOW – there is so much you can do with it that I haven’t even touched yet!

First – shout out to Ronald L – a ds106 4Lifer, who posted in the Google+ Community some work he had done using text to speech voices. This provided a change-up from having to do my voice over or try to find a willing candidate to read and record for me.

From the beginning;

  1. Determine product
  2. Write Script for ear hear
  3. Pre think possible genre for music and possible sound effects
  4. Go to http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/ and create voice overs. – This step required some time to space the text out for some emphasis etc. I also had to try EVERY voice and different speeds.
  5. Download text to speech files as mp3 for importing into Audacity
  6. Search for music background – TIME WARP – I have to get better at choosing and narrowing the scope!
  7. Search and download sound effects – more than needed, but better to have and cut than not enough.
  8. Work with music segment first and make length of desired commercial
  9. Import voices – both into same to keep timing the same for both commercials
  10. Split voices into segments
  11. Change speed of voices on certain phrases to smooth out computer generated sounds and to stress statements. (this didn’t work for all -still a little rough on some statements that I can’t seem to smooth) My script had pilates instead of Zumba – but pilates would not generate into anything close to understanding. Rocks glasses turned into on the rocks for the same reason.
  12. Go back and use envelope on music to raise sounds between phrases, soften background in certain phrases. The music track ended up looking like a wicked roller coaster ride!
  13. Add sound effects
  14. Use amplify, envelope and fades to place and emphasize.
  15. Save original
  16. Save copy as male voice – delete female tracks
  17. Save copy as female voice – delete male tracks
  18. Export each out as mp3.

One hiccup was in the male voice. Every time I exported as an mp3 I got no voiceover. I ended up importing into a new audacity file and then exporting again – this time all tracks came thru. It seems because the voices were mono and in the original they somehow became joined, when I deleted the  female track it auto muted the male voice in export because it was the second track. Not sure if that makes sense – but 20 minutes of tense moments and trying different saves, save as, and exports, I finally came up with a complete mp3.

Still not sure how this all fits into an audio event – but I am building the pieces!

Love to hear any suggestions for improvements! thanks!

 

Oriental Drugs – OK – NOT THAT KIND!

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Oriental Drugs is a pharmacy and store on Milwaukee’s Eastside and has been there for ages. It is one of the landmarks for my character Jerry.

I began by looking up old radio commercials, jingles, scripts, and advertising online. I spent way more time on listening and going off on tangents from links, one after another. Discipline in staying on track needs to improve.

I found some old scripts which were helpful in determining tempo, style, and other things. I also remembered writing for the ear and looked up those tips as well. I can’t say I follow them all – but it allowed me to remember not to be an English teacher tyrant and to write more for listening than report writing or policy and contract documents.

I broke down my script into “ear hear” lines and double spaced for adding in sounds etc. Once I placed all the possible sounds and transitions I went to the next time sucker and visited freesound.org for downloads that might work saving them all to one folder and making sure they had titles that would allow me to read and not have to listen to everyone trying to find what I needed when I needed it.

Once complete it was background music. This is the biggest time warp! So many songs and music and yet going the CC or free copyright path doesn’t always bring about the best choices. They are most certainly there  – but finding them among all the other stuff  – wow! – Who would think listening to 30 second clips could take hours! I narrowed it down to 3 songs.

In Audacity, I recorded my script and divided the ear hear lines into separate sections. I would have preferred someone else reading but really don’t have any willing subjects handy now.  I learned how to finally split a track and to use the time shift tool. I also managed to use the envelope tool, and several effects. I am getting more proficient at keyboard commands that increases efficiency as well.

I had 14 tracks going in this project and found using labeling was helpful as well as shrinking the track sizes, and collapsing once something is in place. Even dawned on me to move tracks up and down when I was working on placements so that other tracks weren’t in between. DUH! It’s those simple things!

While I still hear some things I’d like to work on, I will wait for feedback. Plus I still have another commercial to do and can apply new-found knowledge there. Just trying to keep in mind this is learning and not project outcome for now.

The sounds I used were:

freesound.org Dogs 20130101_131356_vaermland_sledge_dogs_before_start_put_to_sledge.wav
sausages frying.wav
Smoke Detector Alarm
WetDoorOpen2.wav
231255__klankbeeld__pendulum-slow-two-o-clock.wav
1033__rhumphries__rbh-household-refridgerator.wav

Music from Jamendo.com
Shuffle U by Cambo

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