The California Drought - Uprooting Trees and Lives

Final

Myles Lack-Zell and Stefano Pagani
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In this studio we were challenged to create a radio package following the central theme of uprooting. For our radio package we looked at many ideas related to uprooting, but decided to take to meaning of the word literally. Our radio package is about the drought on California and how it is causing the farmers to have to uproot their trees to conserve water. Because of the drought in California residents are having to reduce their water usage, but farmers need a lot of water to grow their crops. Since farmers are not able to get enough water to sustain all of their crops, they must uproot some of their trees in order to have enough water for the rest of their crops. Our final package has interviews that we conducted with people in California, voiceover that we did ourselves, as well as sounds and ads that were downloaded from the internet. These parts have all been put together in Adobe Audition to create a full three minute radio package.


During the process of creating our radio story we were faced with many challenges. At the beginning of the studio we had some basic interviews scheduled, but there was no way for us to record the other side of the conversation. Even once we were able to record the other side, we still had many technical difficulties that caused us to postpone our interview once again. Since everyone that we were interviewing was in California, we had to wait until the afternoon every day to contact companies to schedule interviews. This meant that we had nothing to do in the mornings, and so much to do in the afternoons that we were unable to finish what we needed to everyday. Because studios at NuVu are only two weeks long we had trouble getting interviews with farmers associations and other companies in such short notice. This resulted in us being unable to get any interviews with farmers associations, forcing us to get our interview footage from the internet.

Process

Myles Lack-Zell and Stefano Pagani

In this studio we were challenged to create a radio package following the central theme of uprooting. For our radio package we looked at many ideas related to uprooting, but decided to take to meaning of the word literally. Our radio package is about the drought on California and how it is causing the farmers to have to uproot their trees to conserve water. Because of the drought in California residents are having to reduce their water usage, but farmers need a lot of water to grow their crops. Since farmers are not able to get enough water to sustain all of their crops, they must uproot some of their trees in order to have enough water for the rest of their crops. Our final package has interviews that we conducted with people in California, voiceover that we did ourselves, as well as sounds and ads that were downloaded from the internet. These parts have all been put together in Adobe Audition to create a full three minute radio package.

 

During the process of creating our radio story we were faced with many challenges. At the beginning of the studio we had some basic interviews scheduled, but there was no way for us to record the other side of the conversation. Even once we were able to record the other side, we still had many technical difficulties that caused us to postpone our interview once again. Since everyone that we were interviewing was in California, we had to wait until the afternoon every day to contact companies to schedule interviews. This meant that we had nothing to do in the mornings, and so much to do in the afternoons that we were unable to finish what we needed to everyday. Because studios at NuVu are only two weeks long we had trouble getting interviews with farmers associations and other companies in such short notice. This resulted in us being unable to get any interviews with farmers associations, forcing us to get our interview footage from the internet.


During the studio we worked on three main parts of the radio piece. We started off by getting interviews with people in California about their experiences of the drought. We then Interviewed Kari Hosmer in San Francisco, Taylor Goldenstein in Los Angeles, and downloaded ads from the California Farm Bureau Federation. Once we had all of our interviews we added voiceover to the piece. We wrote a script, recorded the tracks, and trimmed them to fit in between interview tracks. editing took up a lot of the time during the studio. Using Adobe Audition, we trimmed each track to fit into the piece perfectly, as well as picking and choosing parts of the interviews to use in the piece. We added sound effects to the piece after trimming to join the tracks to each other. once all of the tracks were put together we normalized the tracks in order for the sounds to all be at one volume. In the studio we learned about the effects of the California drought.

The California Drought-Uprooting Trees and Lives

Adam Steinberg and 2 OthersStefano Pagani
Myles Lack-Zell