This course addresses how we tell stories in the digital age and their relevance to issues facing society today, including climate change. Through exploring storytelling in social media, mobile contexts, and gaming, this course will experience a range of different narratives in many types of digital media, such as interactive online stories, podcasts, and video games. I examine forms of digital storytelling within media, marketing, and education, with opportunities to research, participate within, and to create original narratives as I share my own stories in a variety of media.
This group project required me and two other peers to create a 4-5 minute podcast. The podcast is a short horror story based off of my team member Addy's workplace, and a murder that happened in her small town. Throughout the podcast we wanted to be able to install fear onto our audience based on sound design and voice acting. Over the course of the story it has unique components that are based on sound effects alone, letting the listener get fully emerged into the story. To edit this story I used Descript, and all of the sound effects and music came from Storyboard. We recorded in a studio at Appalachian State University, where we ran into obstacles about certain microphones, which created some of the white noise you hear in the podcast. When It came time to edit, the background noise from the studio was very apparent in all of the audio files. Another challenge faced with the audio was the different levels. When I had to take specific lines in the script from different takes we did while recording, the audio was often at different levels, making some clips quiet and the other very loud. To solve both of the issues of the audio leveling, and the background noise, I used a lot of keyframes to make the decibels at the appropriate level. I also messed around a lot with the EQ to find which level the noise was at, and did my best to remove it. Although there is still some noise playback in the final edit, it is significantly better than the first draft.
When it came to making the AI podcast, the process was a lot easier. We made a script through gemini and plugged it into Eleven Labs. Using the text to speech tool we found a voice we all decided fit the story, and let the AI do the work. When comparing these two projects there is a lot of dramatic differences. The effort that went into the sound design and effects for our group podcast is noticeably better than the AI podcast. However, the AI podcast has a very clear voice, with no background noise and better clarity than our group project. Our group project has better voice acting, with multiple roles and set characters to act out, while the AI voice can only create one voice per project. The lack of sound design from the AI horror podcast makes it lack feeling and depth, making it harder to stay engaged. When compared to our group podcast the sound effects are designed to keep the audience hooked and feel as though they are part of the story. The script for the AI podcast was decent, but relied more on unnecessary details than focusing on the sound design like our group podcast did. When looking at our podcast it has more originality because it is based off of a very local and true story, which also adds some fear and curiosity into our script. Both of these podcasts have a lot of good qualities that go into audio production, but nothing beats the effort and originality of our group podcast.