Our Durham Neighborhood College presentations were tonight! I think the vox pop went well. At least people seemed to like it. It was strange to watch a bunch of people listen to audio I had produced. A totally different experience from radio, where you have no idea if anyone is even listening, much less how they react. I was gratified that all the parts I thought were funny, they laughed too.
The cartoons were a hit. We ended up making them into Powerpoint slides rather than holding up cue cards, because the ones done by the class member's daughter were on 8.5 × 11" paper and no one would have been able to see them. I was assigned to push the button advancing the slide show, because I had listened to the audio so many times. The crazy thing is, before today I had never used Powerpoint. I was actually nervous about it! I ended up going to the office of a woman in my group, so she could show me how to do it. Turns out all I had to do was push the "down" arrow key every time I wanted to advance a slide. Whew, I can do that!
Beforehand I practiced several times to make sure I had the timing right. I don't have Powerpoint at home (like I said, I never used it before today) so I got a PDF of the slides in order and I scrolled through the pages while listening to the audio. I made a little cheat sheet with the dialogue and marked the exact point where I wanted to advance to the next slide. While I was practicing I even said "BOOP" out loud each time I hit the next slide, to help me remember the transitions. Well, I stopped doing that when Georg got home; it felt kind of silly.
The finished audio is basically what I posted the other day, except I rearranged it some and edited a couple of people. Just to tighten everything up, and to remove negative references to other towns. We decided it wasn't necessary to criticize Chapel Hill and Raleigh in order to praise Durham. (And, we didn't agree with the specific criticisms either.)
Also one person's recording was kind of all over the place -- she would talk about one thing, then another, then go back to the first -- and I edited her a lot. Moved things around so it flowed more logically. The weird thing is, you can't tell at all. It sounds totally natural. I'm kind of alarmed that it's so easy to do that. I mean, I'm an amateur using open source editing software, and I'm able to completely change what she said. I didn't in any way alter her meaning, but it made me realize how easy it would be to do so.
I'm going to make a Youtube video of the whole thing put together -- tomorrow, right now I'm tired -- and will post it as soon as it's done. It was so much fun to work with this group. I really enjoyed getting to know Allison, Ricardo, Barbara and Joyce. During the presentation (which by the way, thank you to the rest of the group for handling the presentation so I only had to do the bare minimum of public speaking, for which I have little fondness) Ricardo called me "Sarita"! That was really sweet.
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