Originally, I wanted to do a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, but when I came across this poem by Charles Bukowski, I knew it was exactly what I was looking for.  As soon as I read it, I thought of a song I used to love by The Presidents of the United States of America named, “Kitty”.  Luckily, the song had fallen into the public domain now that they’ve been split for some time, so I could use it in the background.  I think the most challenging aspect of using this song, however, was that it is a song that tends to catch your attention, which can be somewhat distracting to the listener (also several F’bombs at the end, which I’m particularly fond of).

To combat this issue, I tried lowering the volume of the track, but then you could hardly hear it, and that was distracting.  I tried increasing volume in isolated areas for effect, and that seems to have worked ok.  I’m still not sure this worked like I wanted, exactly, but short of dumping it and starting over with different background music, I was kinda stuck.

In the intro, I tried to approximate a person scrolling through the radio dial for music.  Don’t be alarmed if you can’t understand some of the words, because it’s foreign radio that I recorded on my iPhone, then pumped into Audacity for that “tinny” mono sound.  I like it.  I hope you do too.

By A. H. Norton

I started to make a fun adventure with my kids as actors playing the roles that they always play. The two princesses running the castle which is a school of magic and normal school of cooking. But as I have found out, the wise words of W.C. Fields are true, “Don’t work with animals or children.” When I needed them to talk and be ready, no one was. When I wasn’t ready they were speaking rivers of gold. Funny how that works out that way. So I scrapped the whole improve comedy with the kids and wrote my own little skit.

I found this project to be really fun. I like to play with my voice when hanging out with my kids and making up silly stories. So I went with an old stand by of mine, “Radio Dad”. I use to answer the phone at my previous work with that voice while treating their issues seriously, loads of fun. With that I decided to make a spoof of “Abs and Buns of Steel”. Not that they need any help being silly but I thought I would make a go of it. There weren’t may none offensive body parts left that need help getting buff but I found one. Hope you enjoy it.

I’ve been a big fan and supporter of the stand-up comedian, Kevin Hart, since 2003. I am the self proclaimed, first fan of Kev in the 541. True stuff. I remember going from dorm to dorm, at the University of Oregon, spreading Kevin’s name, referring everyone to his Youtube clips. Over the past 13 years, I have been listening to his stand-up hours. Not everyone gets the chance to see Kevin when he goes on tours, yet I’ve been fortunate enough to see him live twice.

When I heard that we could  create a digital story about any topic of our choosing, I knew that I was going to do some Kevin Hart skits.

My first task was to find a clip short enough to match the 1-2:30 mins criteria. The clip I chose was about the first time Kevin’s mother gave him permission to cuss out his teacher. The original clip was about 4:30 mins long, so I had to make some choices of what I would omit. I started my audio with the intro to his segment, the conclusion, and left everything in the middle out. My final audio clip is 2:50 mins.

During that first day of class, where we were assigned the project, I found the transcript of Kevin’s comedy hour. Then I collected the sound effects I wanted. I included some foley and some ambiance sounds. After I accomplished setting up my sound library, I had the huge feat of recording the lengthy dialogue. I checked out a “snowball microphone” from my instructor and recored the dialogue at home.

Seemingly, nobody enjoys hearing their own voice in playback mode, and I can now join that group. I had to overcome a lot of nerves to get the jokes how I needed them. I completed the entire 2:30 mins in one take after a couple trials, using Audacity.

In Audacity, I recorded my audio and imported my sound library. Syncing the sounds effects with the audio was tedious, but I was surprised when I completed the task in 1:30 hours.

My last objective was to create an image to relate with the audio. I chose the movie cover box of Kevin Hart’s comedy hour titled “Laugh At My Pain.” Then I had one of my art homies, @Freshness, take a head shot of me. After that, I merged the two images. The end result has Kevin’s body, mic stand, backdrop and I placed my face over his. Turned out pretty good.

I hope everyone enjoys my audio project. Had a lot of fun creating it and this project has inspired me to push my skills even further for future projects.

by: Jeffery King Osborns

I had a few things I was trying to accomplish from this blog.  One was to demonstrate the anxiety and rage I feel when the Passages Malibu drug rehab commercial would come on every fifteen seconds while watching tv.  Along with that I planned to demonstrate a moment in my every day addiction to this food thru, “sound.”

From the beginning it has noise of me in the kitchen, grabbing a knife and chopping up some broccoli.  A gentle pause as I flick on the TV.  From there the rest of the story unfolds.  I am truly grateful of how close the soundtrack I found, emulates such an exactness to the original commercial.  Anyone who has heard this track will have an out of body experience.  Close your eyes and breath deep.  Relive the smooth sounds from the passages commercial, clinch your fists, bite your tongue, and enjoy my spin on it.

It truly does feel good, that I could take a personal addiction of mine and blend it with an every day real life issue, without really stepping on anyones toes and feelings. I hope. Anyways, the main message thru this ,from me to my viewers, is to allow yourself to be humorous and light with our everyday addictions, we all have our vices.  And we must take that first step that recovery suggests.  Admitting oneself powerless, and that our lives have become unmanageable.  So get out there, and get some.

In past blogs I’ve mentioned that I wanted to be an actress. So I thought it would be fun to imagine what it would be like to be on a talk show and plug my upcoming movie. I made up a character- Abigail St. Martin, a performer who may be past her ingenue days but is still a major player.
Then I wrote a small scene where she is interviewed by the handsome and charming TV host Randolph McNaughton. A bit of fantasy. During the course of the interview Abigail and Randolph find themselves becoming instantly and increasingly attracted to each other. My husband played the role of Randolph and we had a fun time of it. Got to do a little flirting.

What I wrote came out sounding a little cheesy. But it was cute and fun. There were challenges. Getting the sound effects to match up was difficult. I had my son say a line and getting it isolated away from the “aws” we recorded at the same time into the space was not easy. But once it was done it sounds great. May be the best part of the whole thing.

One of my fears is that some of my longer speeches might be a little boring. But I think it leads into my son’s funny line. Then Randolph’s last line before announcing a commercial break is funny and helps wrap things up.

By Melissa Norton

My project is based off an original story that I wrote when I was eleven years old. At first I wasn’t sure what story to use, but then I remembered all the short stories I wrote as a child. When I came across the story ”The elephant and the key,” I decided to use it as part of my project. The story wasn’t too long and it made me happy reading it. As you listen to the video you’ll notice many errors in the way I word my sentences. I wanted the video to have these errors because I didn’t want to ruin the original version that I wrote as a child. The part that I had the most fun with was adding the sound effects into my recording. I enjoyed this part because it was fun to listen to but also challenging. When I finally figured out how to add the effects I wanted into the program, I felt happy and I had more fun with it. Using the microphone to record my voice also took a lot of practice. I wasn’t able to get my voice to sound perfect the first try, but I kept trying until I got the results that I was looking for.

For this audio project, I wanted to create a podcast of some sort, but wasn’t sure of what to do.  I later decided to try to do a podcast where I reviewed a product, which was the new Prizm speakers, that was going to come out sometime later in the future.

I first saw and heard about it while I was browsing for new gadgets of 2016. CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show, had a posting about all of the neat and interesting products that were displayed for the 2016 show. A lot of the products were ones I wanted to do, but I knew I had to pick one. I came across the speakers not too far into their slideshow, and since I love music so much, I decided to look into it. After finding out more about it, I wanted to talk about it and let people know.

Since I don’t like speaking that much, I decided to get my brother to help me and provide an extra voice. I also think this makes this project easier to do and makes the podcast more entertaining. I wanted a more relaxed approach when doing this podcast, so we both had fun with it. Finding the sounds and music for this podcast was fun as well.

The hardest part was probably trying not to laugh so much and getting my brother to help me. The fan noise from my computer got in the way too in the background. I felt more comfortable doing it at home, rather than doing it here on campus. I’m not the one who enjoys speaking publicly.

Overall, I twas a fun project to work on, even if I am embarrassed to show it off.

-By Tyler Plummer

For this assignment I wanted to tell one of those stories that kids tell around a camp fire, or at a sleepover. This is the one and only creepy story that I know, so I thought it would be a good story for this assignment “also I wanted to draw a dog in a pickle jar”. This story is based on a true event from the early 2000. The true story was, that a woman from the south had diabetes. during the night her dog chewed off one of her toe’s because the tissue had died, much like with frost bite. The dog had probably just assumed it was a strange edible meat treat lie a steak bone. Proving that when you die your pets will eat you. My dad told me about the story, and I embellished it to gross out my friends. What I wanted to accomplish with this project? I wanted to get the same kinda mischievous feeling, that I would get when I was a kid at sleepovers telling these kinds of stories.

I found being the voice for this project pretty interesting. I had to record over, and over to get the right kind of mode for the story; and to get a take where i didn’t mess up. I, myself think I did a good job. Though I didn’t realize tell listening to the recording how much I sounded like a kid.

Finding all of the sound affects from the student library was a lot of fun too. there were hundreds of sounds to go throw,  I know I spent most of my time listening to, a good majority of them, trying to find the right sounds. hopefully the sound affects added a bit of humor to the story and didn’t sound strange, or distract from it.

This project was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the grunt work of writing the story, doing the voice work, and finding the sound affects. I hope you guys liked my story too. tell next time MAC OUT!

heres the whole pickle dog picture.