A Day With a Dog: Medium Specificity Exploration

 https://anchor.fm/quinn-blackley/episodes/A-Day-With-a-Dog-e1dmsnm

My recording, which I’ve decided to call A Day With a Dog, is what I consider to be both an exploration and celebration of the podcast/audio format. After I’d had the idea to record common moments my dog experiences throughout a day, I wondered whether it would be more fitting to capture the moments visually on film or to cut the visuals and rely only on sounds. Ultimately, I determined that podcasts would afford the audience more freedom to contribute to the piece as they listened. With only aural aides, they would be left to envision maybe their own family dog growing up or a neighbor dog or a dog they imagine having one day. I liked the creative opportunity that the podcast could thus grant the audience. As beautiful and impactful as film can be, I think it fills in nearly all the creative gaps that other mediums allow for, and I wanted to leave some of those gaps open. Yes, it would make interpreting some of the sounds more difficult—would the listener recognize when the dog was eating or licking my face or when I was throwing a waste bag into the garbage?—but I think with the context of the title providing some guidance, the audience member could understand and imagine well enough. I recognized, too, that if I were to opt for film over audio alone that the focus would be on the images of the dog. But I didn’t want that to be the focus. Personally, it’s often the sounds that my dog makes that provoke the biggest reactions in me: yawns, barks, whines, cries, chewing on toys, howls, the flapping of his ears. I wanted to focus on these moments and how they create a dog’s day. This project got me excited to use media in interesting, creative, and innovative ways in the classroom. I remember taking Writing 150 here at BYU and the final project our teacher assigned us was to create a podcast. I never thought this genre could be so connected with writing—and I have yet to see another Writing 150 class do it, though they might have—, and after completing that assignment, I realize how powerful a tool it can be. Students could practice applying a great deal of the core standards through this medium and I now want to find a way to integrate that into future lessons and units. Just like it did for me in Writing 150 here at BYU, I think this medium is one that could help students see beyond the standard pen and paper (or hands on laptop) vision of writing and creating in the English classroom. Because it is a less used medium in the context of the English classroom, I feel that it would challenge students to be far more thoughtful and intentional in the way they use it, just like I had to be while creating this piece.