Mashley's+Zombie+Audio+Tour

=Audio Tour of the Living Dead=

The nightmare begins
For my audio tour, I decided that I didn't want to do a mundane tour of state street, or the union (no offense to anyone who chooses those). If I'm going to provide a walk through, I want it to be something that I'm an expert in: zombies. I'm thinking that this is going to be something like the hyperlink novel that we learned about in class. I'm going to make a multi-tracked audio tour that begins at Memorial Library, and gives the user choice in where to go. In the chose your own adventure story, there will be a correct path to escape from the zombie-infested Madison streets, and many wrong ones.

2/20
There's no good way to calculate the time I've spent over the last few weeks thinking about this in the nerdiest ways, but today had some concrete planning. I watched [|Shawn of the Dead] for research and had a planning session with my friend who is midway through the Zombie Survival Guide. We opened up a map of Madison on Google maps, and traced all the different paths that one could take out of campus. Then we mapped out trouble spots where one would be likely to die. We came to the conclusion that Madison, as a congested campus, located near a government capital, many hospitals, and on an isthmus, is a zombie buffet. The skeleton to the choose your own audio tour has been pretty much set, so the next step is writing a script for voice recording.

Also, here's a fun link for those who love wikis AND zombies.

4/2-4/3
I finally buckled down and banged out the script for the choose-your-own-adventure zombie audio tour. It's pretty expansive. I hope it fits within the time constraints. And yet, there's so much more that I want to do with it. I think it could be the next "Afternoon, A Story." I then quizzed my mom, and surprisingly she was able to survive on the second try.

To celebrate I watched "Wild Zero." Crazy flick. Unfortunately supercharged laserbeam guitar picks are not a viable weapon in my audio tour. If only I had watched the movie sooner.

4/20
So, if anyone's friends happened to be celebrating an unofficial holiday today, and recant a tale of an insane boy running through the streets shouting about zombies while filming a script that he's reading, know that it's true. That insane boy is me. And honestly, I got a lot of weird looks.

Today I filmed the majority of the audio tour. The game plan is to cut the visuals, but keep the audio. However, I wasn't about to sit inside and pretend that I was running around the streets of Madison. Nope. Ever path there is to take in the audio tour was first taken by me.

Funny thing I figured out part way through filming though--although my imagination has a grand idea of how this process should work, the physical limitations of the real world are a definite limiting factor. I ran at a moderate speed through library mall, and down State Street, but I realized that not everyone taking this audio tour would be able to do that. Although my conceptualization of the internet involves limitless possibilities and an equalized playing field, the physical part of the mediated space still is encumbered by physical limitations. Not everyone can move as fast as me. Not all the doors I went through while filming might be unlocked when someone is taking this audio tour.

Furthermore, I realized that a set path that I was taking and envisioning is not the only path that a participant might take. Unless I describe very clearly how to move, where to be, and at what time, listeners could have very different experiences. This especially plays a large roll if the user is going slower than I did while filming. I'm describing something that's happening a block up, but they can't truly immerse because they're not in the physical space being described. And what if I don't do a good enough job describing where a user should be at what time? I found myself adding in silly dialogue about which buildings I was by so that the user could place their self alongside me.

Anyway, it was a learning experience. I learned that my fantasies are limited by physical space. I learned that importing to iMovie takes longer than I expected. And I learned that EVERYONE will look at you weird if you're filming yourself talking about zombies on state street.

4/21 and 4/25
I got additional footage of other characters on these days. It just wasn't practical or nice to expect these people to run around Madison with me, so I filmed them after the fact.

4/26
Edited the project today. As I listened through the footage, I realized that I didn't give nearly enough indication of which specific path to take, when to stop for story, or what was going on, while filming. To compensate, I recorded straight to my laptop, which then added the problem of wildly different sound qualities. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to accept this limitation to my vision.

__Other technical difficulties include, but are not limited to:__
Not having the right software to download audio files from the internet. I alleviated this by recording while I played them from the website. This makes all the gunshots very quiet, but passable.

Very loud wind noise from filming outside.

iMovie being an awful program compered to FinalCutPro. I can't layer audio, cut precisely, or get rid of the visuals! In fact, there's no way (as far as I can tell) to just export as an audio file. What?! I'm thinking that I'm going to have to cheapen the quality even more by recording in GarageBand, then pressing play on the iMovie project.

I suppose that the process is what's the most important thing to learn from and comment on here. Mediated spaces are easier to manipulate and work with if you're rich and have fancy anti-wind mics, and good editing software. I could understand where a participation gap could exist in this environment.

Practicum of the Dead!
The scenario: You are Alex, an ambiguously gendered friend of Michael. The two of you awake in Memorial Library early one morning to realize that you've fell asleep during the beginning of the zombie apocalypse while working on your practicum assignments for CA 346.

Begin at the Library Mall entrance to the Memorial Library. Listen to "Practicum of the Dead -- The Beginning," and every time Michael prompts you with a decision, go to the corresponding track (I couldn't figure out how to number them in iTunes, so they might come up alphabetically, at which point you'd have to search out the correct track).

If at any point you fall behind where Michael is describing himself to be, feel free to pause the tape to catch up. If at any point you are unsure of where Michael is, go to the beginning of the track, perhaps the final destination is stated there.

Enjoy!

Track 1: The Beginning

media type="file" key="Practicum of the Dead--The Beginning.m4a"
Track 2: Head Towards the Capital media type="file" key="Head Towards the Capital.m4a"

Track 3: Don't Loot the Outpost

media type="file" key="Don't Loot the Outpost.m4a"

Track 4: Loot the Outpost

media type="file" key="Loot the Outpost.m4a"

Track 5: Dodge Them and Go to the Capital

media type="file" key="Dodge Them and Go to the Capital.m4a"

Track 6: Duck Down Hawthorne media type="file" key="Duck Down Hawthorne.m4a"

Track 7: At the Comedy Club

media type="file" key="At the Comedy Club 2.m4a"
Track 8: Wait inside Humanities

media type="file" key="Wait inside Humanities.m4a"
Track 9: Don't Help the Stranger

media type="file" key="Don't Help the Stranger.m4a"

Track 10: Help the Stranger media type="file" key="Help the Stranger.m4a"

Track 11: Help Barbara media type="file" key="Help Barbara.m4a"

Track 12: Don't Help Barbara

media type="file" key="Don't Help Barbara.m4a"
Track 13: Sidestep the Zombies and Go Down Johnson

media type="file" key="Sidestep the Zombies and Go Down Johnson.m4a"
Track 14: Go Down University media type="file" key="Go Down University.m4a"