Luis and Vitto

By John Dimatos on August 2008, Day 1

For my first day, I’m putting together a story, as told by my friends over voicemail. Last week, I asked two of my closest friends, Luis and Vitto to do something simple for me: call and leave voicemails about each other on my phone. I’ve wanted to do a narrative story using voicemails for a long time, because the lo fi fuzzy sound of voice over the limited frequency range of 300 to 3400 Hz on POTS is something I associate with great stories from friends waiting for me on my voicemail.The second premise of the day, and my general theme for the week, is how to make creative projects at work by picking a project and using resources you can split up into 5 minute stretches of action.

Luis And Vitto (mp3)

Initially, I was going to do searches on google image and flickr, building up a pool of images I can associate with the story, and make a powerpoint style presentation for the story. I quickly found out that 1) it would be too much considering my time constraints, and 2) I just wasn’t finding interesting pictures. So i reframed the project into an even simpler project, just straight up audio, a podcast if you will. Around noon yesterday I started emailing a few more friends to leave me voicemails about the duo, so I could have more filler material. I also needed some interlude music, but luckily, ITPer Adam Nash’s band codename provided exactly what I needed.

The structure of how to created of a ‘Luis and Vitto’ podcast for your friend is very simple.

1. Call or email your friends and tell them to leave you voicemails about your subjects. The next time I do this, I’m going to explicity ask everyone to leave me voicemails under 3 minutes.

2. Using a combination of either Pamela and Skype (PC) or wiretap pro and Skype (mac) call your voicemail and record your voicemails into an mp3.

3. Don’t fuss with the editing too much. It’s not going to be a tight fantastic edit the first time you do it, and you’ll get better over time with figuring out how to keep it tight. The key here is to just get something out the door fast. I learned this the hard way on our first day, since I didn’t manage to finish my project on time.

4. email the link to all your friends, and give them 20 great minutes in their day.

links

the keyword list (google docs)
Audacity, free audio editor
POTS, plain old telephone service
Pamela, the assistant for Skype
Codename, the band

July 28th, 2008