It's A Wonderful Library

This one was my baby. It was so much fun to create.

We wanted to use the It's a Wonderful Life idea last year, but it didn't work out. This time it did. J wrote the script and I put everything together. Those who have seen the movie It's a Wonderful Life will see the similarities between it and the podcast. J did an excellent job on George's voice, Brent made a wonderful Clarence, Melissa was Mary and Jocelyn was adorable as ever. She was the voice and little girl in our Trouble with Gnomes Podcast.

This one took approximately 50 hours of post production. Most of the work was on cutting out the 50 images from the movie and past them into pictures of the library and other locations around campus. One image we needed did not exist and I had to create it. It was when Mary turns to George and asks him what is wrong. I needed a shot of her looking concerned and there were none in the movie that I could use, so I ended up taking one of her smiling at George and removed the smile and brought the eyebrow down. That did the trick.

This was my first time doing the audio for a podcast; I think it turned out ok.

Food for Fines will Pay Your Dues

Carlos was the father of this one. He wrote the script. We added a couple new voices in this one. Shawn was Milly Baze and Brent (a new addition to UVU library) did the music and singing for the food for fines song at the beginning of the podcast.

Psycho for Study Rooms

J wrote the script for this one and he and I did the shooting for it. Unfortuanately the camera we used was not working correctly and turned out many of the pictures blurry. Due to schedules and deadlines we had to use those rather than reshoot. They still kind of worked because of the old timey look we gave the podcast. We used Melissa again, but added a new comer. I thought Warner was perfect for this role and did an excellent job. It was a fun one to do.

The Wizard of ERES

J'Oday and I wrote this one. I am not sure where the idea came from, but the timing was perfect because the movie was celebrating its 70th anniversary when we released this podcast. Melissa was the girl. J, Andrew, and I were the other characters. My favorite part of this podcast is the nontraditional ending. It is not a happy ending for everyone.

Get A Clue Podcast

The get a clue podcast is up and running! We have had a great response from English 1010/1020 and CLSS 1010 instructors. They are requiring their students to come do the "Get a Clue" library orientation. The orientation is based upon the popular board game Clue. To do the orientation students must begin by watching our Get a Clue podcast. The podcast sets up the game by showing that an item within the library has been stolen. The student doing the orientation is the assistant to the detective in charge of the case. His/her job is to follow criptic clues left around the libary by the detective and find out who stole the item, where it is now and what was stolen.

Here is a raw picture from the podcast of J's legs while he was doing Detective Hemlock P. Shmolmes.














Here is the Podcast:

Student Orientation Podcast

We have been working on the student orientation podcast this summer and it is coming together. I spent 11 hours working on it last Thursday. We watched the unfinished rough cut at the library retreat at the word perfect campus. We got a few laughs out of it. Mostly because some of the images used had shots of the puppeteer in them (I didn't have time to crop all the photos yet). It is amazing to me how long it takes to create a slideshow podcast like this in Final Cut Express. We hope to have it all done in the next couple weeks. As a side note the Zombie library instruction podcast we were going to make has been scrapped and may be reworked into just a vidcast.

Summer 09

We will not be releasing any new podcasts this summer. Our next release will be in August 2009. Here's what we are working on this summer. The first vidcast is a library orientation video that will expose new students to what the library has to offer. The script is already written and we have our actors and costumes. We will begin shooting soon. We are also creating a zombie podcast that will teach students how to do research. This will be used for our information literacy courses. Our third podcast for the summer will be a tour of the library.

Science Fiction Frontiers

This one is a video release of a previous audio libcast. We took pictures all over campus in all kinds of places with all kinds of people and as those of you have done anything like this know very little of it was actually used. None the less I thought this vidcast (video podcast) was great!

It highlights where the new library is located. J and I had a good time playing around in the construction zone where the old library used to be. We also got quite a few curious stares from the construction workers. We had many students around campus wanting to pose for a shot with our actors so we let them. However, most of them did not make it into the vidcast.

In one of our next podcasts the Captain of the USS Enterprise is accused of a dastardly deed. Stay tuned and keep on viewing.

No Such Thing as Gnomes

If you like cute then this podcast is for you. It is about a little girl that is seeing a gnome in the UVU library and the gnome is getting the girl into trouble with her mother. The focus of this podcast is on our family study room, where parents can come study in the library with their children. Let me clarify that it is not a place to leave your child unattended. I was impressed with the acting ability of the young girl. Her expressions and tone of her voice were excellent. Our "mother" and narrator also did a great job as usual.

The idea for this podcast came from a children’s book I read when I was a kid. It was book from the Three Investigators series. An elderly woman, who lived alone, claimed to be seeing gnomes in and around her house carrying pick axes and shovels. Everyone she told about it thought she was insane. The three investigators decided to help her out and get to the bottom of things. Spoiler: Eventually they found that some midgets dressed as gnomes were tunneling from her home into the bank vault next door. They dressed as gnomes so that if someone saw them and told someone else what they saw no one would believe them. The rest of the script came from me, J, and Lesli who added her motherly touch on it (since the rest of us are childless).

Here is the podcast:

Who Would Win?

This J walking style podcast is made up of the opinion of several students on who they think would win some character match ups from our "who would win" contest.

The "who would win" podcast came from an idea that I had when I was talking with J about matching up movie/book characters against each other. Originally it was called "if they fought." We thought it would be fun to use this idea for our yearly national library week event. The event featured a March madness type of bracket that patrons could fill out. At the top of the bracket they would write in their ultimate winner of all the match ups. Match ups were created from characters from books and movies located in the UVU collections. Some match up examples are: Jason Bourne vs. James Bond, Hagrid vs. Chewbacca and Willy Wonka vs. Pee Wee Herman. The bracket can be seen at http://www.uvu.edu/library/brackets.html.

The contest portion was implemented online. Patrons voted from our "who would win" poll page. The character that won the online polls must match the patrons bracket winner for them to win the prize. We actually had several patrons that had their bracket winner match the online polls winner. As a result we had to back track a few rounds to see which patron would be the winner of the prize. The prize was a gift card donated from Cinemark theaters. The poll page can be found at: http://www.uvu.edu/library/whowouldwin.html.

This event ended up being a big hit. We had 80 brackets entered in the drawing and 0n average 200 online votes per match up. It was great to hear patrons walking through the library talking about the match ups and why they thought people would win. We even had a few professors participate in the brackets and online voting. We plan to make this a yearly event and hope that next year will be even bigger.

3

3 was a last minute replacement libcast that we did to replace one on Jazz. We just were not feeling it and did not have enough knowledge and experience with Jazz. All of our ideas having to do with Jazz just were not good enough. Our main train of thought was to do a Jazz radio show of some kind.

Those who have seen the television show 24 will recognize that 3 is a parody of it. We were very pleased with how quickly and well it came together. J and I wrote the script. It was so much fun and really turned out for such a small amount of work. Give it a listen; if you've seen 24 you will love this! Those who acted in it were Holley, J, and Trevor.

Captain Copyright

The captain copyright was our first video podcast. We did this without any previous experience or expertise. Despite this I was pleasantly surprised with how well it turned out. Thanks to J for creating the puppet and editing the script after I made it. Carlos did all the editing of the video once I recorded it. The hardest part of recording the video was when we did the walking scenes. We had to create a moveable platform to put the camera and tripod on. The long boards we used did not go exactly straight.

The script for this podcast was a joy to write. I did it in about an hour after our podcast meeting. Superheroes are easy to write about because there is so much that can be done with them.

Some fun things to look for is Ben K's wrist can be seen for a split second during the fight scene. The cape flying up at the end when captain copyright pops up next to Melissa was a mistake but it was funny so we left it in.

Podcasts Before Captain Copyright

This blog was created around the same time as the Captain Copyright video was released so postings of previous podcasts have not been given. I will give some breif information about them here. Where's the Library This was our first podcast. We had not moved into our new building and thought that we had an awareness problem. This podcast proved it! Celebrating Sundance We created this podcast because we wanted to highlight some of our media collection. Celebrating Sundance focused on our Sundance videos. The best part of doing this podcast was that we had the opportunity head up to Park City for the Interview. We spent the whole time up and back discussing our favorite Sundance movies.

Rap up Your Research
Some members of the libcast team thought it would be fun to do a library rap. Well ours only shows you how unoriginal we were. We chose one of the most well known raps of all time to use for our parody. I would say it is right up there with the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme.

Plagiarizers Anonymous
This is one of my favorite ideas that we used. It is also the first time we addressed plagiarism. Ben K. did an amazing job on the Lord of the Rings voice. It was pretty cool to hear him do it for the first time. Orgiionally I toying with the idea of having him do the dumb jock and he didn’t feel too comfortable doing it. I agreed with him that his other voice was better. It was kind of outside the box and this wsas the first time we pushed outside the serious role with our podcasts. Lesli was ok with it so we went with it. I thought it worked. J did an excellent job being the moderator’s voice.

Step into the Finals Zone
Can you guess what time of the year it was when we made this one? Yup time for finals! We’d been wanting to do something a bit creepy and well, I can’t remember exactly how this idea came about. We did a podcast survey about this time for our Utah Library Association presentation on podcasting. One great comment we received from a student was how much he/she loved how the creepy voice guy kept pausing and slurping his spit before continuing. Well, that is students for you.

Library Mythbursters
This podcast was my idea. At the time I was way into Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters. Well we thought that since the UVU library and its staff are so unstereotipical we would talk about it. At this point we had just moved into our new library and it was the beginning of the fall 2008 semester. Our new building and library is not like libraries of old and we wanted to highlight the differences.

Science Fiction Frontiers
Once again the highlight is the new library building. We thought that since many students may not be aware of where the library is that a visit from some of the most famous explorers ever would be fun. Originally we wanted to do this one as video, but it didn’t work out and we did it later and rereleased it. This one was J’s baby. Nice job on it J.

Iron(ic) Chef
This idea and script was all Lesli. I had never heard of Iron chef but it turned out to be a fun theme for the podcast. Claudine did an excellent job as the host and J made a fun quirky Finish Chef.

Got Fines?
Once again it is the end of the semester and Christmas is upon us. This is the time of the year when the UVU library does its annual food for fines. We wanted to advertise it so we made this podcast. Carlos had wanted to make more commercials for our podcasts and we thought it might be fun to make movie trailers. Somehow it evolved into a guy flipping TV channels. We each threw in our own trailer or commercial. This podcast was fun because it was so random.

The Captain
Next came Captain Copyright which we recorded late at night during the break. This was our most complex podcast to date. It took 3 days of shooting and took Carlos countless hours of editing. It was also the most fun J and I have had making a podcast.

Updates

Updates are made as new libcasts are released to the UVU library libcast webpage: http://www.uvu.edu/library/podcast.html. Our goal is to release podcasts each month that UVU courses are in session.

Welcome!

Welcome to the UVU library Libcast Blog where the focus is on Utah Valley University (UVU) LibCasts or Podcasts. Libcasts are podcasts created by the UVU Libcast team. My name is Benjamin Wilson. I am a member of the committee and developed this blog to provide additional information about the libcasts.