1) Read Eric Maierson’s Ten Ways to Improve Your Multimedia Production Right Now. Most of the things Eric mentions you heard in the project critiques in class on Thursday. Your group will get a first-project grade on Sunday Thursday and have until 5 p.m. Friday Monday to get me a revision.
2) Don’t forget to update your project journals.
3) Embed (or link to) a good journalistic audio slideshow on the class blog. Try searching for “audio slideshow” on Mediastorm or on Vimeo.
4) Rewatch and listen to Musical Maycie. The project creator, Erik Castro, will join our class by Skype on Thursday to discuss the project. Come armed with questions. (Note: If I have to miss Thursday class for birth duties, we’ll reschedule for a later Thursday.)
5) Listen to episode #396 of This American Life: #1 Party School. Pay attention to the different layers of audio and how they overlap and play off each other.
6) Using a digital recorder, phone, built-in computer mic or some other device of your choosing, record yourself telling a story: a joke, an anecdote, a fable, whatever. (Also be sure to get at least 30 seconds of room tone.) Note: If you use the computer’s built-in mic, you can record directly into Audacity, etc. If you use an external device, you’ll need to import the file.
Using This American Life as your inspiration, find an accompanying track or two on one of the Creative Commons music sites. Think about using the music to break up, accent and play off of the voiceover story. We’ll work on these in class on Thursday, so you should show up with headphones and at least two elements on a USB drive: your voiceover and the music file.
