For the radio play I helped to create, I also decided to make a commercial—we had two commercials in our play, both of which were made by one of the members of the group.
I decided to make a commercial for ds106 itself. I didn’t even look to see at the time if there was such an audio assignment; I just looked now and there is not, so I think it’s time to create one.
My first thought, and the one I went with, was to use various clips from what others have done or created in this summer 2013 version of the course, the ds106zone. So I started thinking about what I had heard during audio week, and what would fit an ad for ds106.
Then I just added in some narrative to suggest reasons why one might want to participate in ds106, including the ability to make gifs, make audio, and get smack-talked by Jim Groom. I also wanted to highlight that it’s something you can do anytime, not just during a specified time period.
The process
I used Audacity for this project, and downloaded the audio I wanted to use from other participants through Soundcloud (see credits, below).
I then used Soundflower and Audacity to record some audio from Jim Groom’s ds106zone LoDown #18, in which he talks a great deal of smack about some recent audio work. That part was really fun. I had a hard time picking and choosing what to include, as there was so much smack talk available. I decided not to pick on any one person and what he said about their audio, and just to combine a few of his reactions, such as “what?” “what is going on?” “I mean, come on!”—hoping thereby to capture the flavour of what he was saying without singling out any participant’s work.
Finally, I used Soundflower and Audacity to record some audio from Scottlo’s ds106 LoDown #15, which included a Scottlo Drive By Counting Lesson by Andrew Forgrave, which asks Scottlo to learn to count by twos to twenty in Hindi. I just took out the “can you dig it?” and “again, again, again” portions; the first seems to be a recurring theme in ds106 radio, and the second is something that fits, to me, ds106—one can keep doing it again, again, again.
During that counting lesson, Scottlo says at one point: “you can do it at home,” meaning his listeners could try to count along at home with him. But it fits perfectly as an ending for the ad, since, of course, one can and often does do ds106 at home.
I recorded my audio first with the mic that is on my Apple earbuds, but I didn’t like the sound quality. I didn’t think I had any other choice, so I went with it, and got version 1 of this commercial.
But when I sent out a tweet saying I needed to buy a decent mic, my partner showed me that he had already bought one last year. Cool! So I used that for this second version, and it sounds much better, I think.
Credits
Here are sources for the elements I used in this ad—thanks to all of them! I love building on work by others!
ds106 bumper mashup by Rochelle Lockridge soundcloud.com/rochelle-lockridge/ds106-bumper-mashup
“Moonglow” by Brian Short soundcloud.com/brian-short/moonglow
ds106zone LoDown #15 by Scottlo scottlo.com/?p=1614
— which included audio from “Scottlo Drive By Counting Lesson,” by Andrew Forgrave: soundcloud.com/aforgrave/scottlo-driveby-counting
ds106zone LoDown #18 by Jim Groom: scottlo.com/?p=1648
Parts of The Twilight Zone, “It’s a good life” episode.
License
This commercial is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA, since one of the elements used in it is licensed as such. This blog post is CC-BY, though.