Catching up with Friends
Catching up with Friends
Conversational atmosphere
Two friends try and see where life is going while getting off a train.
Pre-Recorded Voice: the Chicago Transit Authority speaker
Repetitive Noise: City sound loop, found thanks to freesound.net
Exclamation: Passing Car honk, found at http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/
Running time 2mins 28secs
Cast: Character A: Jason Borntreger
Character B: Dustin Lawrence
It’s funny, I believe that the intention of the assignment was to have the Oulipian guidelines constrain our creativity, when in fact it did quite the opposite. If given a perfectly blank assignment I would have struggled to find a solid idea. I don’t think it would be unreasonable to assume that most of the class would have asked for some guidelines, especially a required time length. Having a few fences put up in my way guided me to my idea for this assignment. What inhibited any form of progress and prevented any kind of quality from my final product was the format of the assignment.
The Oulipian guides of the beginning line, time length, exclamation, and repetitive noise all served to usher to this idea. In my head the first thing I thought of when I heard “To begin with they never got along”, was two friends sitting and catching up on a recent break up of tow other mutual friends. It is not a mystery to me why I thought of this first, I am simply writing what I know. Recently I had a conversation very similar to the one I had my two friends verbally act out. I had these two friends, my two friends started dating, and then my two friends (after a year of being a successful couple) broke up. It was hard on both of them, but it hit me hard because I had been modeling my own relationship after their’s. It was kind of a, if they can’t make it what chance do I have kind of a moment. Well while I was sitting with a friend a few months back I realized that the rational I was assuming was the cause of this breakup was actually the worries and doubts I had concerning my own relationship.
In all honesty I know why my friends’ relationship ended; they wanted different things out of life. She wanted children and to settle down in a family way. He wanted anything other than that. After a certain point they both acknowledged that they ultimately were moving on different paths and decided it was best to split. I was far more worried about staying with my girlfriend because of a feeling of obligation. While writing the script for this podcast I thought it would be interesting to have the listener character call out the knowledgeable character on confusing his stories. The “Who are we talking about here?” line is actually just an echo of my own internal dialog for when I realized that I was not thinking of my friends’ relationship but my own.
The purpose behind the setting was I simple. When I first heard of “pre recorded voice” the first thing I thought of was the voice of the CTA announcer calling out the stops. From there, everything else in the planning processes just fell into place. The repetitive noise would be a loop of city noise or train noise. The exclamation would be one character screaming or cursing after a taxi nearly hit him crossing a street. In my head it all worked out flawlessly.
So the Oulipian guidelines posed no real threat, technology did. The version of the podcast that hopefully (knock on wood pray to Jesus) is attached to this word press page is my third attempt at completing the assignment. Yes, believe it or not I had a version of this podcast recorded and ready to go last Wednesday, but files weren’t combatable and resources weren’t available for me to use over the weekend. So, I tried the audacity way of doing things. Horrible little program’ too limited in its scoop, not user friendly, not easy to learn, and its ugly.
I decided on the location of the scene based on a sound effect I all ready have in my possession. However, after several attempts I was unable to get my copy of the CTA man saying, “This is Noyes” into audacity. What I was finally reduced to doing was holding the mp3 recorder up to the headphones of a Christopher Center computer and playing a youtube video of someone else riding the train.
I found myself extremely frustrated during most of this assignment. Frequently I would hear the sharp bing of the computer telling me that whatever it was I had wanted to do was not going to be done. Bing, file full. Bing, file incompatible. Bing, wrong format. I am ashamed of the work I was forced due to technological difficulties and time constraints to turn in and publish on this website. I do not think it sounds very good, I do not think it does my original idea justice, and if given the opportunity I would gladly delete it and try to start again.
December 8th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
James,
Sorry about your frustration with Audacity. It’s interesting to note in the context of having read Moran that my main reason for using Audacity is that it’s free and therefore available to everyone.
Even though you are unsatisfied with the final product, there are things to be proud of here–the turn, as you note in your eval, of the conversation about others to the revelation that it’s about oneself; the fact that you’ve created a traditional story (beginning, middle, end or climax to crisis to resolution) in 2 1/2 minutes; the unsettled, unfinished quality of the conversation represented by the interruption of the cab’s horn.
Funny how, even though you didn’t not record yourself, your “voice” is all over this. It was interesting to learn that it was autobiographically rooted though that is not all that I mean by your “voice.” I mean, too, your concerns and even your syntax. Very close to who you are in class. A creative nonfiction, then.