When Life Gives You Lemons…
Sometimes the most difficult thing about a project like this is coming up with a good idea. After approximately 2 hours of reading Google search results for thought provoking questions , I decided to ask for help. My parents suggested I talk about immigration, dogs, or read an essay I had already written. I didn’t really feel any of those topics. Then I thought, who better to call than my best friend? He spent an hour on the phone with me trying to help me come up with a great topic. “You’re over-thinking this. Anything you choose will be great if you do it right. You were on the speech team anyways right?” I just wasn’t convinced. I really can’t see myself talking for 4 minutes on the radio, although I could easily go on for more than 10 in real life. Exhausted, I mockingly suggested, “I should just make my project about me asking people what I should do for this project.”
“That would be awesome,” he said. He suggested that the deeper meaning could be the fact that humans rely on one another for ideas. We need help from others to form a basic starting point for our own thoughts and ideas, the same way we rely on Google or Bing to form the factual basis of our research (he’s an Engineer, what can i say?) And that’s how my Audio-Essay proposal came to be. A few Tylenols later, I’m sitting here sharing it with you.
I can’t say that I have this assignment planned out to the last detail or that it won’t be completely different by the time I submit it, but here’s my idea. I’ll give a brief explanation of the situation, as I did here, in the beginning of the essay and introduce the question. Then I plan to interview many people, mainly looking for short answers but periodically focusing on some interesting ones that the audience would like to see developed (hopefully such ideas will, in fact, come along so that I don’t raise my hopes for nothing). Each segment will be under 5 seconds long, aside from the ones that will be developed, which will be approximately 20-30 seconds long. As was suggested in the assignment, this essay could be part of, or the beginning of a potentially longer Audio-Essay which goes on to actually explore the topics suggested (which I probably won’t do). I’ll be broadcasting from many locations, but primarily from Baruch and my home. As for recording equipment, I will be using my handy dandy smartphone and Macbook. My questions are: Do you have any suggestions for improving my essay? How can I make it more interesting/appealing to the audience? Do you think it has the potential to be funny or serious? Also, from a technical standpoint, what is the best technology to use for the technologically challenged?
2 responses so far
That’s a good message to work with but the question is how you are going to ask people about it. The last week this point was mentioned. I suppose you can ask people indirectly of what you want to hear, something like “If you going to tell a story that will be broadcast in a radio show, what story will you tell?”
How funny or serious your essay is going to be will really depend on the answers that you get. If you get some ridiculous answers or even answers that seem completely unrelevant to the topic (misinformation), then it certainly can be funny.
As for the program, I think you can use GarageBand on the MacBook pretty easily. We did have practice with it on tech day.
I hope your interviewings are coming along fine!
I still stick to what I said in class. You may need to lie (or some form of deception), in order to get the results you want. Maybe saying something along the lines of saying that the audio recorder is so you don’t forget what they tell you. I just think that you’re going to get a couple of ‘I don’t know’s if you say that you are going to share the responses you get with your English class. I think it has the potential to be both, funny and serious. There are people that are going to legitimately want to help you with your project, and then there will be people who just want to make a joke. Of course you can get completely different results because (as far as I know) I can’t tell the future. I’m sure you’ll somehow end up being surprised by the results, so good luck.