Radio Show Progress Report
At the time of me writing this post, my group is well underway in creating our radio show project! Since I knew this project was coming up, I made sure to check out my email and Discord to see what the instructions were going to be. I was rather happy we got a chance to pick who we got to be in a group with instead of simply forcing several of us to work together. I think that made the effort of working on a group project seem more natural to people, especially since this class is asynchronous and most of us have never met one another!
After this project was announced, I was quick to jump in Discord and let people know I was willing to work with whoever was interested. After some trial and error, five us us ended up grouped together. I took a little creative liberty and named our group The Fab Five, simply because I didn’t want something as mundane as Group X, or whatever. I took charge for a bit and created a private Discord server for all of us (including Professor Bond!) to chat in. This proved to be useful since we have been active in chat, discussing how we plan to contribute, and even arranged a voice call Monday night to get everything settled!
I was pleasantly surprised when everyone was on board with my idea to recreate an old radio drama. I actually supplied the script for The Roy Rogers Show episode “The Missing Scientist” since I had had it on hand since coming up with the idea a few weeks ago. Sunday night I actually sat down and edited the entire script to include references to Bob Ross, while fixing formatting and grammatical errors that might have tripped us up while trying to record lines. Afterwards we all divvied up parts. There are ten different roles, so we split them up evenly between the five of us, taking two apiece. This all took place during our voice chat, where we also discussed who would be doing commercials, bumpers, promos, and posters.
I actually created a promo for this production, but only recently got the project finalized. It wasn’t that it was hard, but finding the time while midterms are ongoing is a struggle. The promo is about forty seconds in length and advertises our show, so I hope to include it in the final production before the start of the show. This is one of the audio assignments I chose to do this week. I’ll include it in this post down below.
At the moment I haven’t finished my second audio assignment, but I’m planning to create some music for the score of the show. I would like to create something that is ambient or can be used as a transition of some sort. I’m currently working in MuseScore, and for someone who doesn’t know the first thing about reading music let alone composing it, wish me luck! I’m playing it by ear, so we’ll see how it turns out!
As the moment we also have two bumpers made, and two more of my group members are working on commercials. So, it appears this project will come together nicely by the end of next week!
As I write this, my group had made plans to meet in the HCC on campus to work in the vocal booth. Unfortunately not all of us were going to be able to make the meeting due to being too far away from the UMW campus, and then there were COVID related problems that cropped up. In lieu of that, we agreed to try and make Zoom out go-to recording studio. I’m kind of looking forward to it, since I recently bought a microphone that has pretty good sound quality for the cheap price I got it for. Plus Zoom will allow us to meet all at once, allowing us to record each of our lines in a script reading environment. None of us are voice actors, but we’re going to try our best!
And that’s how it’s going for The Fab Five so far! Stay tuned for another update around this time next week! And look forward to catching our radio show once it’s done!
