Monday, January 30, 2012

Middle School


Middle School

      I listened to the story called Middle School aired last year that was basically an interview where a host, Ira Glass, was talking to a 14-year named Annie who emailed the website with a suggestion for a show. She said she got the idea for this show because of a conversation she had with her friends earlier that day but did not want to put her name in the email because she feared being ridiculed by her fellow classmates.
 The entire interview was sound clips with some music of the interview between Glass and Annie. There were some direct quotes from Annie, but at some times Glass did summarize a response she had with an indirect quote. The music that was played was suitable for the audience this story was intended to attract. It wasn’t too childish but not too mature either.
After the interview, Glass talked to some specialists about the stage of a child’s life where they are in the middle of being an adolescent and a teenager. During this part of the audio, you heard the voices of both Glass and the specialist and some music. While she was discussing the part of a child’s life where they are acting more like children, you heard music from different famous cartoons that children watch often. But once she moved on to their earlier stages of the teen years, different music came on.
Like it said on the website campfire journalism website, dialogue allows the audience to see and hear characters interaction with one another. Instead of just using quotes form Glass’s interview with Annie and putting them in a written story, he decided to make an auditory story that allowed his audience to be able to hear first-hand exactly how she answered the questions—where she laughed, when she paused, when she got quiet. All those little things played a very important part in being able to adequately tell this story.
Later on in a different interview with a teacher talking about students during a middle school dance, you could hear in the background the kids laughing, yelling and having fun along with the music. This was a brilliant idea because everything the interviewee was talking about, we could also hear in the background.  

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