Merry Hacksters’ Radio Show

The main activities during the past two weeks have related to the creation of the Merry Hacksters’ Radio Show.  The whole experience was unique.  I have done very little work with audio before and I have never worked on a group project that was organized and executed using Twitter as the sole communications medium. Being limited to message of 140 characters (less when you take into account that our Twitter handles took up a fifth of those letters)  certainly encourages succinctness.

For our group the topic pre-dated the formation of the group and I think we all chose to join because we were interested in the subject matter, hacking and remixing . The theme was suggested by one of the group members who took the lead in organizing the structure of the project by creating a document to sketch out the plan of the show.  Initially I planned to interview someone I had met about a Toy Hacking Activity that took place at a local Mini Maker Faire, but unfortunately she was out of the country on vacation.  Luckily our leader put me in touch with someone else who was willing to be interviewed via Skype.

I found the project quite challenging as I had not used Audacity before starting DS106.  I know a little bit about it now – how to move tracks, import audio, cut parts of tracks, do fade-ins and outs, duplicate tracks, but have more to learn.  I ended up creating four short pieces as follows:

Intro

Bumper

Commercial for Mozilla Webmaker

Interview Piece with Stephanie West-Puckett

Daily Creates

During this two week period I did several daily creates.  The one I spent the most time thinking about was TDC648, The Ground Beneath Your Feet.  I wanted to take a picture of the actual ground, not a floor in a building, or concrete, or asphalt.  It was then that I realized that during the course of a day there are only a few steps that I take on the actual ground which hasn’t had something built over it.  I ended up taking a panoramic picture which, because I moved the phone too quickly, had some strange duplicated pieces.  I though I might use just some of the duplicated sections, so pulled the image into Photoshop to edit it.  I cropped it, but it didn’t have any real interest, so I found some special effects and applied one of them.

The image of the bookcase was created by taking a picture of a reflection in a dark window.  I hadn’t thought about the effect that the screen would make on the picture, but it ended up providing an interesting grain to the photo that makes it look a bit like an oil painting on canvas.