Archive for December, 2007
News From Colorado
About 2 years ago, I moved into a house near Bradley with 3 other guys. 2 of the guys were FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) missionaries at Bradley, and the other guy was a teacher at Peoria Notre Dame High School. We were a multi-ethnic group - a Lebanese, Egyptian, Indian & Polish. It only lasted for a little while because they all moved away the next year, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted! Sadly, the only picture I have of all 4 of us is a picture that I took with my cell phone a few days before the fellowship broke up. Click on the picture for a larger version.
I’m going down to Texas on Wednesday for the first national FOCUS conference. Since I was going to be traveling anyway, I decided to leave early and spend a few days in Colorado with Anand (my old roommate - the one standing on my right in the picture). Now, I love the Midwest - I’ve lived there my whole life. But, there’s something really cool about visiting the mountains. Anand probably thinks I’m weird because whenever we’re driving around, I’m like a rubberneck, always looking around in wonder at the different landscapes and sights.
I first saw Colorado almost 6 years ago on my first Bradley Chorale Choir tour. That was quite a trip, and was the first time I saw mountains. I’ll have to scan some pictures from that trip because I wasn’t shooting digital pictures at the time. Nothing could describe the awesome sight of seeing my first mountain after driving for days through flat plains.
It was kind of the same feeling this time. We’re driving to Anand’s house, and directly ahead, you see these mountains shooting up to the sky. It’s an awesome sight! I’ve created a new gallery for Colorado pictures, so click here to check it out. I’ll be adding to it over the next couple of days.
A Christmas Carol
Now that you’ve been introduced to one of the fun projects that we did in college, I thought I’d put up the other Christmas themed project that I produced. This was the final project to my Audio Production class, which was a lot of fun. In the class, we did project on the old reel to reel tape, produced 30 second commercials, and finally got to choose to do a dramatic reading or a radio drama.
I chose to do a radio drama of A Christmas Carol, since it was due around Christmas time. So, I got my friends, Jeff & Mike, to help me out, especially because of Mike’s voice talents. And, I brought my younger sisters into the recording studio to do some of the children’s voices.
If you’ve ever looked at the original Christmas Carol script, it’s huge! It was over 60 pages when I printed the whole thing out. Since I wanted to actually finish the project, I cut it down to about 20 pages, trying to keep the whole essence of the story. Of course, with Mike’s voice talent, we again went with certain themes with his voices. See if you can figure out what voices he was trying to imitate for the various characters.
Click on the links below to listen to this Christmas classic. Or, click on the picture to view a larger version.
‘Twas The Night Before Christmas
Since it’s been a while since my last post, I wanted to make this one really worth it. So, in the spirit of Christmas, I dug through my old projects, and pulled out one of my audio projects that I did my senior year at Bradley.
Well, let me back up. Back in college, during my sophomore year at Bradley, I met 2 of my best friends - Jeff & Mike, who were both multimedia majors with me (that’s a recent picture of us). We had really similar interests, were in many of the same classes together, and used to hang out a lot. People used to call us the Three Amigos, since we were always hanging out and working on projects in the labs together (during finals, we would practically live in the multimedia labs - more on that in another post).
There was a lot of work to do, but we would always have a lot of fun working on projects. One of the projects that I had to work on was a final electronic music project for one of my music classes. I had to create a recording incorporating voice and creating all the music.
Since I wanted to do something fun for this project, I decided to do a Muppet version of the classic poem ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas. Jeff, Mike & I are all huge Muppet fans. So, I wrote up a script depicting a “reading” of this poem by various Muppet characters, did the recording, and created all of the music. And, I knew that Mike was VERY talented with recording voice characterizations, so I recruited him to help out with the project. Listen to the project, and I think you’ll be pretty amazed at the wide variety of voices that he can do. I obviously do the initial announcer voice, and I do one other voice (see if you can tell which one!), but Mike did all of the others.
The whole “reading” is around 10 minutes, but it’s very entertaining. So, click here to take a listen and let me know what you think!
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Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
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