Brainstorming
The piece of advice from Ira Glass that I related to most was his insistance that “often the amount of time finding the decent story is more than the amount of time it takes to produce the story” (Part 2, 0:24 – 0:28). I know that personally, I spent several days mulling over what I could do my audio project on. It’s actually a great way I’ve invented to fall asleep. I start thinking about an idea I really have to come up with and that’s it, I’m out. Really though, no matter how great your editing or your background music is, if the story itself is a total bore than your audience won’t care how much time you’ve put into it. The actual story is the heart of the show and the show can’t exist if the story’s not strong enough to support it. I got scared, though, when Ira Glass said that sometimes he completely scraps an idea after recording it and everything because it doesn’t come out as he pictured. What if my recorded version of my concept is a total snooze? I don’t think I’ll have time to come up with something new, though I’d like to. I think that’s something we all risk in a project like this with such a close due date. We only really get one shot, so while Ira Glass’s advice is true, I’m not sure how applicable it is in this case.
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I really liked this piece of advice too because I struggled in the same way. It’s hard to find an interesting proposal for our audio project because it’s such a different type of work compared to what we’re used to. However, I think that we can all bring our own creativity and unique experiences to make our projects worthwhile.
It would be so nice if we actually had time to say, “Hey, this didn’t come out the way I wanted it to and I’m actually putting myself to sleep. Lets try this again.” Unfortunately we don’t… which makes this whole project nerve wracking. However, if we had a later due date we could very easily procrastinate and put it off until those last few nights and end up exactly where we began originally. Coming up with ideas is so difficult. Sometimes we think something might work and even though we don’t have time to test it out, something in our gut tells us it won’t work and we’re back to square one. Thinking ourselves to sleep yet again. These projects require and incredible amount of time, trial and error as Ira stated but since we don’t have the luxury of time, I guess we’re just going to have to cross our fingers and hope for the best. Yay?
I get nervous when I think about the possibility of my project not working, too. This is the first time we’re doing this, though, and we have a limited amount of time and resources. I feel like we have room to really experiment and try something new here, and if it doesn’t come out exactly as planned then it’s not the end of the world. At least that’s what I keep telling myself!