Audio Bio Reflection
1.) I decided the story I wanted to tell based off of the "I Am From" assignment we started with. I thought about how I could incorporate all the ideas I had from that assignment and try to talk about them without going through my entire life and listing off things about myself. I realized that everything I brought up in the assignment were memories from weekends I had. It made me think back to how much I really enjoyed my weekends in the fall growing up. I realized I would be able to describe many elements that make me who I am today by going through what I believe is a perfect weekend. Then I came up with a list of things that made my weekend perfect, while incorporating parts of the "I Am From" poem, and described each day to the audience. Sharing the story with others was a struggle at first because there were times where I thought it was too personal. I was able to find topics where the audience would be able to learn about my life, but I did not get too personal to the point where I did not feel comfortable talking about it. This was the first challenge I faced because once I figured out what I was comfortable talking about it was easy to write it in the format I created for the narrative. The other challenge was recording my voice while reading a script. I had trouble making my voice sound like I was telling a story rather then reading what I wrote down. I had to write the script the way I talk so I would not have to change it on fly while I was recording to make it sound unscripted.
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2.) Working on this audio bio was not difficult because it is pretty easy to think about what makes me who I am, and we were also set up to use the tools needed to make this project. Doing the "I Am From" assignment really helped me think about the different forms that make me who I am. Watching the videos about how to work Audactiy made the editing process go fairly smooth. The process started by taking my ideas from the "I Am From" poem and using them into the format I chose to write the script for the audio bio. The rest of the script was easy to write because I thought back to all the things I enjoyed on the weekend growing up. Then the way I organized the information was very effective. I set it up so each section would talk about a different part of the weekend like the audience was with me going through it with me starting with Friday after school through Sunday night. All I had to do was make sure I organized the script so it would flow and transition smoothly for the audience. I also wish I took out a couple topics in the narrative and focused more detail on a few parts. I feel like that would have made it more effective. At the same time I also feel it was important to keep all the topics because it was necessary to include to describe my perfect weekend. The struggle was finding what I should cut out of the script because there were some stories I wanted to add, but it would have made the script drag on for the audience.
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3.) Overall I liked what I did with the audio bio assignment. I liked my idea to create a story using a perfect weekend to describe who I am. I loved weekends in the fall, so I thought it was the perfect way to easily talk about aspects of my life. I think I needed to make my delivery of my narrative more exciting. I had trouble reading a script and delivering it in a way portray how I felt about it to the audience. It was too difficult to edit in new sections of the narrative that I recorded on different days because it did not flow with the sections I wanted to keep. It made it more difficult to edit, so I continued to use the recordings I made originally and had already started to edit. I think if I was able to vocalize my emotions better through the script it would have been a more effective audio bio. However, I did like the pacing and the flow of my story. I thought the music fit well with the flow, but towards the end the song was annoying and started to distract from the audio. I adjusted down the volume level of the song when it started to be distracting, instead of trying to pick a second song to add that would also match with the original. From this project I will be able to use the editing skills I learned to work on trimming the refugee interview down from an hour of recording to 5-10 minutes of audio. I also learned how difficult it is to share your life with an audience, so I will understand how difficult it might be for the refugees who have not been interviewed before.