Our group consisted of three girls. Girl Power! We initially thought about social media and celebrity culture when first received the topic ‘attention’. We brainstormed and settled on an idea really quick. We worked on the collaborative contract on the spot and already planned out next group meeting. It went oh so smoothly! well at the beginning at least..
Our topic was on how attention on social media impacts our lives. We were going to focus on two main case studies Kim Kardashian who is considered to be a ‘traditional celebrity’ and Danielle Bregoli the cash me outside how bad day girl, a ‘micro celebrity’. During the process of research and writing out my annotated bibliography which i really struggled with (because i was so not familiar with evaluating a secondary text), I was intrigued by the idea of micro celebrities who are essentially created by the attention on social media they receive. I thought it was perfect for this assignment as it portrays how big of an impact social media has on this generation that there are ordinary people who are becoming extraordinarily popular into micro celebrities by just being themselves like Danielle Brigoli on Dr. Phils. Although some times those things are staged and most of the Instagram models we know solely dedicate their time and money into that one perfect picture to gain that ‘instafame’, we overlook those and are just fascinated by what we see at that moment and we like it (literally) which relates to hyper attention in a way.
Micro celebrities are made by us, social media users because we give them attention and that is what they make money off of and puts them on the list of ‘popular’ but they don’t necessarily have paparazzis following them around or live in huge mansions. They live their ordinary lives except they have a specific range of audience and fans on Youtube or Instagram who follow ,watch and admire them for who they are whether it is their looks, or their eccentric character trades. I thought it would be fun to create a micro celebrity of our own and put her voice and character into our audio piece. So we decided to incorporate an interview with our fake micro celebrity ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ into our very one radio talkshow called the ‘GiGi and Chlo’s Talko Show’.
We had the idea of making a radio talk show from the very get go but the contents that we wanted to fill it with were formed on the way. Obviously we thought we needed a snappy name and intro for the radio show which we did by just putting together our nick names (Although nobody ever calls me Chlo..) Gigi and Chlo to make it sound more stylish and interesting. Ofcourse since we are an Australian radioshow and we talk in it, ‘talk show’ which Nat came up with, seemed very appropriate and friendly. We decided to open up with a public interview where we asked the public some general social media related questions and testing them on their knowledge of celebrity news. Then we recorded a discussion piece with social media guru Nat about the relation of the millennial these days and their excessive use of social media effecting everyday lives causing privacy issues and furthermore.
That day as a group we recorded the intro, the discussion and the outro of the talkshow and this was before we decided to bring in our fake micro celebrity ‘Elizabeth Taylor’. We promised to meet the next week and work on the rest but a problem occurred the whole discussion piece with our social media guru was unusable as every single word spoken in it glitched. So we had to re record but due to the absence of our group member we had to go another way which is when we thought of bringing Elizabeth aka Ellie to life. It was quite easy to come up with a micro celebrity who became famous over a night; Youtube was the perfect platform for find those who craved or just happened to be instantly popular. We researched Youtube for interviews of them we looked mostly on the Ellenshow and gathered the most typical questions and responses and implemented them. Although it was hard to work only with two members (we had to play multiple roles) i think the outcome turned out to be better.
In terms of editing the most challenging part was to keep up the hype of the talkshow because we weren’t professional journalists or radio hosts, our enthusiasm weren’t exactly going through the roof. We tried..We really tried. Anyways in order to achieve that vibrant tone of an everyday afternoon radio show we packed it in with radio sweepers and spot sounds. We tried to balance out the amount of sound effects to create a rhythm and just left them out in places we thought were unnecessary. I think we definitely could have improved more on our script and incorporated more of our academic research into it but i guess we missed that because we were trying to set up a very casual tone. I also found group work quite difficult when one of your group members just disappear out of sight, out of touch but have learnt to become more flexible in terms of coming up with alternatives and overcoming the situation by just refreshing my mind and editing faster.
