Eighteenth Day- How's The Weather In Your Neck Of The Woods? - Posted on 2016-02-25 by Jon Francois

This week, I wrote and produced 10 weather reports. As you can imagine, the writing process took a few hours and it was a challenge to make each report not sound like the other. To achieve that, each report was based on a certain city/state in the country and I used a variety of weather conditions including fog, party cloudly, freezing rain, hail, snow showers, etc. Initially, I tried to make the reports 15 seconds each, but when Jay allowed to go longer with each, it gave me breathing room to make the reports more conversational just as he requested. I found myself producing straightforward, bland, formal reports under the 15 sec limit. The time flexibility made quite a difference when it came time to record. I felt more relaxed than I’ve been in the past because the more I practice these exercises, the more I’ve realized that you just cant rehearse a natural conversation with the audience in a million takes. The max amount of takes i did for each report must’ve been two and that was mostly because i slipped up on a word here and there. My strategy was to write a formal script for each report, but only as a guide to where I wanted my conversational approach to go. Most reports were in the 30-40 second range.

As part of the chapter about the audio editing test, Jay had me edit cliche phrases out of each report. Some examples are “for the most part”, “be careful/stay safe”, and any phrase where im basically repeating something i said previously, but with different wording.