The second week of The Audio Essay started out on a note of high anxiety for me; we all made a professional story pitch. Over the weekend, our assignment was to create a formal pitch for a personal essay to debut on a radio program. Theoretically, if our pitch did well in class, it was a sign our story might have potential for a real radio program. I appreciated the obvious practicality of the assignment, and the idea that my classmates would act as cut throat as a real production team definitely motivated me to put a lot of time into the project this weekend.
In actuality, I may have taken this whole “your classmates are a skeptical production team” too literally. I was quick to critique my classmate that I didn’t think his story was interesting enough to make a production worthy audio essay. Felicia informed me that the point of this exercise was to help develop an existing pitch, not suggest an entirely new one (what happened to learning to abandon ideas early??).
We spent some time playing with high tech sound recording devices, running around campus to capture interesting noises. The exercise was fun, but I don’t know how many of us will be developing our own sound effects for whatever story we decide to produce.
I’m hoping we do get around to reading aloud our latest personal essays tomorrow. So far, the most invaluable element of this class has been the availability of my classmates as critics and collaborators.
That’s all till tomorrow!
