Harry Williams

Boy, life has been crazy these past few weeks, and I apologize for not updating this site.  I’ve been working on several projects, rehearsing every night for Little Women, and started teaching a little over a week ago.  I’m teaching 3 classes this semester:

• Intermediate Multimedia Authoring
• Introduction to Web Design
• Advanced Flash Development

So, I’ve been really busy gearing up for these classes, and now teaching them.  Plus, Little Women opens tomorrow night!  I promised pictures, so I’ll post those when I get a chance tomorrow.  And, hopefully, once things settle down a little, I’ll be able to post more frequently.

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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.

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI (Outtakes)

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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!

Oh, and one other thing - if you like articles on my blog, then please spread the word.  Click on the link at the bottom of any post labeled “Share This.”  There, you can share that post to any of the social networks, or you can click on the “Email” tab to email the post to someone.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

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Let me just say that I love Amazon.com. Ever since they became popular, I’ve pretty much always bought my books from them. They “get it” with web site design - the site is very easy to use, and they have some great features. I’ve recently started using their wish list feature just to keep track of what books I want to purchase in the future. When I want to place an order, I can order all of them, and have them show up at my door 3-5 days later. No, this isn’t a commercial for Amazon, I just think they run a great business.

That’s why I’m really interested in seeing how well their latest product - the Amazon Kindle - is going to sell. I went to Amazon’s home page yesterday and there was a letter from the CEO talking about the Kindle. So, I checked out the page for it, and it sounds interesting. Check out the page here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA

Basically, the Kindle is a new wireless reading device for reading electronic books. The difference between this device and other devices is that this device is not backlit, and is supposed to be very easy on the eyes, not like a computer. You can wirelessly download books for about $10 direct from Amazon, and can also subscribe and receive magazines, newspapers, and blogs directly to the device. Then, once downloaded, you can store and read these books at will. It’s supposed to be great, especially for travelers, with around 88,000 books available for download, and it can store up to 200 titles at one time.

There have been other eBook reading devices before this one, and PDA’s have also had the option to store eBooks. However, they’ve usually been hard on the eyes like using a computer screen, and none of them have had the vast power of Amazon behind them. The Kindle is pretty pricey at $400, and it has mixed reviews so far.

But all of these things make this device really interesting to me. I’ll be really curious to see how this device does. I doubt this or any device will totally replace books. There’s really nothing that can compare to reading a real, physical book. But, technology like this could become popular with people, especially in the mobile society today where people travel a lot.

What do you guys think? Would you buy a device like this?

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Boy, was it a busy weekend!  Last night, my dad and I got back from the Information Marketing SuperConference in St. Louis.  Most people hear that I’m going to a conference, and they say “Oh, that should be fun,” thinking it’s a fun conference from 9 to 5 with after hour parties and such. Well that’s definitely not the case with these conferences!

They are fun, but in a different way. You get information thrown at you for 4 days straight about marketing, running businesses, etc. Every day starts at 8 AM and goes until 9 PM or later, with about an hour off for lunch and dinner. So, these are far from relaxing conferences. But we sure learn a lot.

One of the speakers at the conference was Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity.com. He had a really interesting story and presentation telling about his experience with working with AmericanAirlines, and his move to create Travelocity.com, which revolutionized the travel industry. When you think about it, booking travel today is vastly different from 10 or 15 years ago. Back then, you usually had to go through a travel agent. But, after the start of Travelocity and other sites, 10,000 travel agents were put out of business, and today, the majority of people research and book airfare online.

His talk was a good example of one of the sayings that kept reoccurring throughout the conference - the only thing that we can count on is change. It’s an old saying, but definitely very true, especially today. Living in the Internet Age, things are changing faster than they have ever changed before. Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and blogs are just the big online phenomenons that have cropped up. Digg, del.icio.us, flickr, Technorati, and RSS are some of the lesser known technologies. Change is in the air, and business that adapt are the ones doing the best in this new world.

Speaking of YouTube, they showed some quick clips before starting some of the sessions at this conference. One of the funniest ones was from YouTube. Click here to view it.

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