Over fall break the Wire Buyers talked a lot about planning and meeting up via our Facebook group, but today was the first day we actually got the chance to meet face-to-face. We have been using a google document to plan our project and post our individual work thus far. Today I met with Imran and Lauren to initially discuss a game plan for our project. We were kind of confused on the concept, but then met with Professor Groom and two more group members, Maggie and Jessica. We finally worked out a design strategy, as well as who would work on what. We designated the following tasks, though there will be overlap).

• Communication between group members & communication between group & professors: Maggie
• Gathering of bumpers: Imran
• Gathering of commercial (music) breaks: Jess
• Blogs about the process & progress of the radio show: everyone
• 4-5 minutes of commercials (per person): everyone
• promotional image: everyone
• organization of bumpers, music breaks, & commercials to make up the radio show (several people could do this): Lauren, Alison-Organizer of Google Doc and show planner
• Final edit of all the parts of the radio show: Jessica

It’s nice to have a layout of tasks per person. I went home after our very productive meeting to organize the google document to make things easier to sort out. Everyone has been great about posting in it and putting links as well, so I just shifted things into separate categories (i.e. commercials, bumpers, etc). I also put the times of everything that has been recorded and the name of the creator next to each creation to keep us on track.

I decided it would be best to map out our plan for the radio show thus far and did so in the document. Our idea is to focus on product placement in the Wire and do so by creating a show mostly made of of product commercials that we have made ourselves. Each person made at least one commercial and a poster for the group so far and they all look great! They will be wonderful in the show, though there is still much work to be done before Sunday.

As for the show itself, we plan to start out with the tail end of a conversation, of which I wrote, about product placement to clue listeners in to what we are about to do our show on. Then we will move into about 4 or five commercials, followed by a bumper. Jessica and Lauren intend to create some song mashups from the Wire, so we want to incorporate those and maybe introduce them somehow through dialogue, possibly as a caller asking for a particular song to be played. Then we will go into more commercials, followed by a possible lead into another radio discussion that keeps people interested. Professor Groom helped come up with this idea. We may introduce David Simon and say we will talk to him in the next show, though we never will. This gets a bit more dialogue in, but also serves to make it a mock radio show, and like the commercials are real. Our whole concept is to make them real and advertise the same things that are placed about the Wire. We will finish our the show with more awesome commercials and a bumper.

Obviously the plan is not fool proof yet, but we have great people making some really cool stuff. Once we have it all together, we can finalize our plans and make our show!

The road so far:

Promos:

 

 

ds106 Radio Bumpers:

Commercials:

Despite having more to do, I think our project is already very strong. The people in our group know what they are doing and we have a great concept to work with. I think it will be a great radio show in the end. Tomorrow we meet via google chat with Paul Bond and then on Friday we should have all of the pieces we need to finish our show!