Crossing up the Movies: Audio Mashup Idea

On today’s drive across a large swath of Virginia, I was listening to some episode of a new radio show The Truth.

With production quality along the lines of This American Life I am thinking it has good examples for ds106 students to learn the qualities of good audio storytelling (use of music, sound effects, tight editing, good writing).

The shows really draw you in to the story; I heard today Eat Cake where a couple meets in the most unlikely way (a cold phone call to a stranger on Valentines day), and the transference and augmentation of interaction passed bu the participants in Interruptible.

These radio shows are dramatic fiction- the site bills itself as “Movies for Your Ears”. But the episode I heard today on Movie Mashups was a bit different and the host described it as not their typical show:

but on listening, I had that reflex of “This would be a great ds106 assignment” so now it is:

As demonstrated by the Movies Mashup episode of the radio show The Truth, take two different movies and extract the dialogues scenes of actors form each, then re-edit them to create a story as if the characters from different movies were in the same conversation.

Listen to examples from the show including The Terminator and Legally Blonde (“Terminally Blonde”) and from the TV shows that become “The Sopranos in the West Wing.”

If I really was pulling ym weight, I would actually do this assignment as an example, but I shrug and say, their examples are better. No I will do this one eventually. Doing ti well would mean getting enough lines from two different movies to edit them into sub clips, and doing the recombine. The first example where The Terminator brushes off Reese Witherspoon’s character form Legally blonde is so tightly edited, you believe it is a real conversation.

This is a hard assignment! Are you up to it? What two different unlikely movies would you use, ones that have enough dialogue to make a back and forth audio show of a say 5 minutes. I’m thinking in terms of the Kirby Ferguson scheme of Copy, Transform, Combine in this process- the transform might be less here (does that make this more of a mashup then, I still trip over the difference).

Anyhow, with the launch of the fall classes of ds106 starting next week, get ready to amp up your game. It’s time to start making a lot of art!