GALO Magazine

I am happy to be working as a contributor for podcasts with the online publication GALO Magazine.  After a few weeks of tough work, I have finally published my first piece: A Q&A session with singer-songwriter Mary Fahl.  It was a great experience to speak with Fahl over Skype about a range of topics.  She really was a great interview subject, and, in addition to being a fascinating artist with great stories,  she made me feel like an old friend.  After the jump to GALO's site, you can read my intro and listen to the 54 minute interview.  I will leave you to find the details after the jump!

I am going to be continuing my work as a contributor to GALO in the coming months.  Below I am also posting the link to my contributor page, where the rest of my stories will be linked as well.  The first link below is the Fahl interview.  Enjoy!

http://www.galomagazine.com/multimedia/being-fearless-mary-fahl-talks-anne-rice-and-love-gravity/#.UyioGIXF_9t

http://www.galomagazine.com/author/jarrett-piette/

"Adaptation" Audio Replacement

This is another audio replacement project from my Sound Design for Film class.  This time we were all assigned a specific scene from the Charlie Kaufman film Adaptation.  It was certainly difficult to replace the dialogue of actors like Nicholas Cage (and the other Nicholas Cage) and Meryl Streep, but again this project was a blast.  It was especially fun during the class screenings, in which we watch the assigned scenes in chronological order according to the film; the film was not quite complete, and the voice actors keep changing, so the variation became almost another element, another character in the film.  Again, some mistakes I wish I had noticed before, but I think this came out pretty well.  This project also inspired me to finally see Adaptation, and it is a fantastic film.  I hope you enjoy my take!

"Megamind" Trailer Audio Replacement

This is the final project for my class on Sound Design and Film.  This class was fantastic, and really gave me a better focus on sound in film, which I tend to geek out about a lot since taking the class.  We did a few experiments in audio replacement in this class; muting the audio track and recreating the sound as best as we could.  The final project was to use a movie trailer as the clip, I chose the animated sci-fi family-friendly comedy Megamind. It was definitely a challenge, and despite the large amount of time I put into the trailer I feel there are some oversights, but it was so fun and I got some great acting for the voice parts.  I hope you enjoy!

Grandparents Oral History

I wrapped this piece at the end of last semester.  It's the final project for my intermediate audio production class (RTVF 41).  I had thought about doing the project on either my grandparents or the regulars at an aunt and uncle's bar in NJ, but I went with the grandparents because I already knew some of the stories, and I knew that it would be a sure thing.  I would love to do the bar piece at some point in the future (maybe next semester), but make it a longer-running project; I want to go every two weeks or so for a whole semester if I can, and make a really solid piece about the wide range of characters they get down there.  Anyway, this piece turned out pretty cool.  I spent about eight hours editing it today in Hofstra's editing lab, and I was smiling almost the whole time.  Many of the stories in this piece I've heard a bunch of times, others I heard for the first time while recording them.  I could have made an hour long show with the material I got from the day I spent with my grandparents, but unfortunately I had to try to constrain myself (I stilled failed, the 10-12 minute piece goal ended up around 15min...oh well).  I plan on making a longer piece for my family for a (now pretty late) Christmas present.

Take a listen, or a download, tell me what you think.  A big thanks to my mother, my aunt, and of course Grandma and Pop-Pop for all their help with this!

Marijuana piece

For my midterm project in RTVF 41, I struggled to find a subject that was viable.  My professor assigned me the idea to look at the legitimization of marijuana, especially with Proposition 19 in California being a very hot topic at the time.  I interviewed Hofstra Law Professor Herbie DiFonzo and Drug Policy Alliance employee Evan Goldstein for this piece, both had a lot of great things to say.  Partly due to the nature of my interviews, the piece is a bit of an argument for legitimization.  It also went way over the time limit suggested, but I wanted to touch on as many aspects of the debate as I could, and looking at medicinal and recreational use seemed necessary to me.  In any case, I hope you enjoy this one, I think this is one of the better pieces I've done.

Hofstra Oral History

Hofstra is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, and has been putting on a lot of programs for students, alumni, anybody really.  One of the more interesting programs was introduced to me through my RTVF 41 class, an intermediate audio production class, and it's called the oral history project.  Communications students from Hofstra interviewed faculty, students, alumni, employees and even community members from the surrounding area in Spring 2010, and our class was responsible for turning the longer form interviews into short oral histories for Hofstra's website.  We paired up with another classmate cut these pieces down, and my friend Ken Dunn and I chose a professor named Warren Frisina.  He's a professor of religion and philosophy, and he's also Dean of the Honors College which Ken and I are both members of.  So while I did not interview Professor Frisina, this piece still shows my editing skills pretty well, even when in collaboration with my friend.

You can see more about the Hofstra Oral History Project here, although none of the pieces done by my other classmates have been uploaded

Music Production Piece

My friend Matt Fishman is a music composition student at Hofstra.  For several months now, he has experimented with making beats with computer music programs, and has even branched out to incorporate them into a larger band with live shows.  Matt and I have always been really into talking music with one another, and when I had a final piece due for my Radio Magazine class I decided to profile what he was doing at the time.  I have to admit, this was one of my most stressful and busy finals weeks at Hofstra, and I think this piece may have suffered a bit from that.  While it does follow much of the same style pretty well, I could have used some more audio to create this content.  Again, I would like to revisit this piece, with more content, probably from Matt's new band, so that I can create a more comprehensive piece.  Maybe just as he's about to get famous =P

Piece about blogging

This piece was also made for Radio Magazine Production (RTVF 42), in an issue of "Voices" based around technology.  When I made the piece, I had never dabbled in blogging at all, but now I'm writing a blog post about an audio piece that looks at the blogs of a married couple.  Susan Senator and Ned Batchelder are family friends, and I contacted them because I knew they both ran blogs, and Susan is a published author as well.  Interviewing them was really interesting, I hope you like the piece.

"Voices" Issue 2

In my second audio production class, Radio Magazine Production (RTVF 42), I learned a lot about the form of radio magazine. Once a month our class put together a roughly 30min-1hr magazine radio show, based around a central topic.  Sometimes students would team up for a piece of the magazine, but mostly everybody made an individual piece then submitted it for editing into a larger show. The attached audio comes from the second issue that our class produced, with a theme of "life and death."  Each student in the class produced an individual piece on this theme, which they turned into me as "producer."  I was then responsible for editing what was given to me, putting it together into one cohesive show, and narrating to create flow into each piece (actually I chose to that, but only because I did not want to direct a classmate's narration...).  Some of the pieces submitted were very interesting, and I enjoyed what was a long night of editing and recording.  This one is pretty long (about 33 minutes), but please give it a listen when you've got a little more time on your hands.

Ultimate Piece

If you know me personally, you'll definitely know that I play Ultimate (or frisbee) with a passion.  I've been playing for a long time, and I don't see any end in sight.  I used my passion for this sport when I was assigned a final project in my first audio production class at Hofstra (RTVF 21).  The piece that follows is the result of that project, featuring interviews from Josh Seamon and Patrick O'Brien.  It's pretty much my first foray into this style of audio production, more of a starting point than anything else.  I hope to do another piece covering ultimate, perhaps more in-depth, and more exemplary of what I've learned in production.  For now, enjoy.