Parody of ShamWow and Web 2.0

https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/BrowsePrivately/psu.edu.2923939450.02923939463.2946858513?i=1614854422
Many web 2.0 tools have a far reaching and deep educational value that can enhance the learning experience of many and give a richer and fuller quality to the ongoing intellectual process, this is not any of that.. it was just fun.

 I used and explored, mostly through trial and error (a great learning experience) web 2.0 tools as a fun way to complete our assignment which was "how could you influence or plead with someone to check out your blog, wiki, niing or other web 2.0 site" and I choose a parody. Some of the challenges were technical, others dealt with time constraints and some were self imposed obsessions to do something that I liked and felt satisfied at the end.

So, first came the idea and that was germinated by Megan's direction of "what would it take to get someone to visit your site?" and for me it would have to be catchy and funny. I thought of a commercial and then out of the blue I thought of a parody of an infommercial (plus I am a fan of the genre, I first was going to do Ron Popeil the guy that brought us the oven where you just "Set It and Forget It!", Ron was the original TV pitchman going back to the '60's-my Dad owned a Ron Popeil Pocket Fisherman, one of the original TV pitched products.. enough of the back story) to explain a little about what the idea of web 2.0 is all about. I roughed out a script and started to flesh out some ideas.

I was able to find the original ShamWow script online and used it as a template for pacing and to capture some of the catch phrases used in the original. I needed some good background music, my first attempts in Audacity were failures.. bad tempo, wrong musical type. When I decided on what kind of music I wanted, I then had to find it. I went to a Torrent site and downloaded some music files but one of them was suspicious in how it acted etc., so I went elsewhere.

One of the songs I wanted to use I know I owned on a vinyl disc but a long torturous search revealed nothing except memeories attached to the old disks. I fianaly found a song I liked, but since I purchased it in iTunes, Audacity could not import it for some reason. Turning to the Audacity wiki I found a work around (record to a cd, play it in WMP and record it into Audacity) it worked.

But now the audio track I was laying down sounded terrible. The microphone from my web cam could not handle the sound. All of the track was clipped (too much digital information trying to get into a limited amount of bits on the track and you get static.. sounded bad). I tried almost every filter that Audacity offers but to no avail. I now know about almost every filter Audacity has and what it can do (another great learning experience).

Frustated with the end sounding result I went out and bought a microphone with the understanding of the salesman that if it did not record without clipping I was going to bring it back the next day, he agreed (gotta love seasonal help at Staples) and off I went.

The new microphone recorded beautifully. Full sound waves on the spectrogram scale in Audacity with plently of band width to manipulate with Audacity's tools. i was able to fade in, fade out, cut a piece from another take and splice it into another track, speed up a section to change my voice and in the end have fun with the whole process. When learning can be fun it's not learning at all, it is just joy.