I appreciated the warning that this assignment would be difficult, so I started working on it pretty early knowing that I’d probably get frustrated, but I didn’t think I would fail at this assignment as bad as I did!
I wanted to find some happy instrumental music, some “twinkly” sounds or techno fun without much lyrics. On account that I literally only have 7 songs in my iTunes (not including those free U2 songs), I had to go look up mp3 video converters. It seems like a lot of them aren’t around anymore, but I finally found one and decided to mix “Domino” by Jessie J and Rita Ora’s “How We Do”. They’re both up beat and mixed pretty well!
I downloaded audacity onto my laptop, and opened the first MP3 “Domino.” The song starts with some audio, but the first lyrics are “I’m feeling sexy and free…” and the rest of the lyrics really aren’t that great for my commercial either. I looked up some tutorial videos online and found one that easily explained how to adjust the vocals in a song. I used the “split stereo track” feature in audacity, inverted the vocal one, and then made the two parts of the song “mono,” and that made a perfect audio background. You could still hear Jessie J’s voice, but it was very faint and the focus was on the audio.
If I knew better, I would have picked two songs that were more similar in speed. “Domino” is much faster than “How We Do”, but when you change the speed of audio, you change the pitch and it just sounds very different. I watched a bunch of videos on how to adjust the tempos of the two songs to fit each other but I couldn’t quite get it. I really only wanted to chorus of the Rita Ora song where she sings “How we do”, but I ended up making her almost sound like a chipmunk, which wasn’t what I was going for.
I’ve been doing my assignments on my tablet because my laptop is ancient and does not function very often, but since we had to download software for windows, I had to use it. I started having issues with my laptop after working on it for 5 hours or so– (getting the blue screen of death)—but a few days later it started working again. The software also kept freezing…or maybe it was just a lot for my computer to handle. After reviving my laptop and finding the entire 2nd song nowhere to be found in the project, I moped around and decided to forgo the second song and just put my voice against the “Domino” audio.
Of course, when it was time to export the file, an error comes up asking me to “modify the metadata” and that the disk is full and bunch of crazy looking characters. I tried exporting to every format and got my nerdiest friends to help, but now my laptop is dead and I’ve given up
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3V4rP97xJPAQlAtcVM5RkRqaWR5RlJQVDRPemktRVExUDVV/view?usp=sharing
tcruzn.wordpress.com 
I feel sorry for you, but, look at the bright side, I think your recording is quite compelling as a commercial even without BGM ; )
LikeLike
Oh man sorry I hear about your misfortunes with the assignment. At least you were able to upload some material that gets the point across about your blog. Audio programs can be a pain especially if you’re not used to them; it’s also good that you got to learn a little bit about mixing sounds and figured out that the two songs would have been too different of a tempo to mix. A program like protools would have been more easy to maneuver compared to audacity but unfortunately it cost so much money! Your blog commercial makes your blog sound interesting anyway with all the detail you go into.
LikeLike
I think your commercial is great and your descriptions are very true about how everyone wants that unobtainable body but are hindered by work,school and other things. I couldn’t really hear the background music and if there is anything you needed to fix. It would be to raise the music volume just a little bit. And i like how you incorporated your blog title into your voice over.
LikeLike
I think you did a good job with this commercial given the circumstances you had to work with. It’s easy to tell how much you care about eating healthy and taking part in other healthy activities, and that sentiment comes through in this clip. The only critiques are the obvious due to the complications you had with your computer.
LikeLike