I wouldn’t say this is the first time that I am involved to produce a audio only production, but this is more detailed and skilled than what I had experienced before.
The idea of a person listening to the radio in the car was inspired by myself doing that. We tried to avoid an essay kind of approached as mentioned by our teacher that a lot of students did that in the past year and that wasn’t what the teachers wanted and found them boring, which I think we have achieved this quite successfully.
The final production sounded so much better when what we have imagined. We are really happy and proud of our work.
We are glad that we are allow to use copyrighted materials in pb4, we talked about how difficult it will be if we are only allow to use copyright free materials like pb2 and pb3.
I found producing an audio project easier and more difficult than producing a video project at the same time because there are less effects to worry about, but are also limited with the effects because you cannot show the audience anything visual at all.
We had trouble deciding how much sound effects to give away, whether we include everything as possible like the unlocking of the car, opening the doors to get inside, ignition, acceleration, switch on radio, or just a subtle hint of switching off the radio when the person arrived home.
Personally I think my challenge was I had no idea what Riverdale was when my group decided on the topic, so during our group meeting I’m usually quiet when Linda and Drizzle are discussing about what happened in the story. To be honest I gain better understanding of this show but still cannot say I understand the story well enough like they do.
With group work, it is difficult to include everyone’s idea into one final product, perhaps it is a good thing to have too much idea that we cannot include everything rather than not coming up with enough ideas.
I think finding mutual free time is a difficult thing for our group too. This is mostly my problem of working and my daughter’s extra curriculum activities on the weekends. Most of the time Linda and Drizzle worked together when I’m absent or show up 2 hours late from the set time.
We found it difficult to come up with a natural way to incorporate all the requirements
What worked and what didn’t?
I think the radio call in worked really well, it is very realistic.
I raised the issue of it sounds like ‘Bonnie’ can predict the radio will be talking about Riverdale because that particular conversation happened before the radio broadcast part starts, but Drizzle and Linda said it will be fine so we did not do anything to try to ‘fix’ this issue.
We were worried about that the audience will think it is a bit odd that both ‘Bonnie’ and ‘Linda’ get through the call in so quickly, but as Hannah said this is fiction so it doesn’t have to be THAT reasonable.