Radio Documentary
Brief
Working in a group we must produce a BBC Radio 4 styled documentary on a topic of our own choice.
Our Idea
Our group consisting of Michael Wilkinson, Sarah Aylward, and myself discussed ideas for subjects that we could base our production around. We wanted to base our documentary on a subject that is currently in vogue and relevant to ourselves as students. We decided to document the problems that students and educational establishments may face during the current recession.
Our Research
We individually listened to BBC Radio 4 documentaries to identify structural elements and common traits to aid us in our production.
I have listed some of these below:
- Clear controlled voice over narration.
- Vox pop styled interviews.
- Regular questions to break up long blocks of speech.
- Introduction to interviews.
- Appropriate backing music to highlight specific content.
- Opening and closing statements
- Use of interviews by credible sources to back up points made.
Our Project
I wrote a brief script for our project that we could develop as a group.
We met as a group and discussed our ideas and made changes to the script. We then planned and distributed roles for our production.
Production Roles
Phillip Shakesby
- Producer
- Narrator
- Interviewer
- StudioRecorder
- Editor
- Administrator
We decided that as our production had to be produced in the style of a BBC Radio 4 documentary we should aim our project at the same target audience.
“Radio 4. However, the mature, broadsheet-reading audience are strongly attached to the station as demonstrated by its strong approval scores”
BBC Radio Analogue Services Review p127
We then discussed ideas for backing music and settled on using just one piece under the narration to identify it as being different from the interviews, we chose ‘Money’ by Pink Floyd.
After conducting our interviews we had to revise the script slightly to fit and we recorded the narration in a sound studio to get the best possible sound quality.
We then structured the audio into our final mix.
Project Review
I am happy with the finished documentary that we produced but there were some interesting learning curves during this project.
Working as a team we tried to split the work equally so that everybody involved had the opportunity to provide input. This worked well but we should have spent more time working together to help each other in areas where shared knowledge would have been useful.
We also learnt the importance of professionalism when working as a group, we found out that if one part of the group fails then the whole group can be at risk of failing.
During this project I had the opportunity to research and use some of the amplitude and compression effects available in ‘Adobe Audition’. This was extremely helpful and it made me realise that there are a wide range of tools on the software that I have not used before, they may be useful to me in the future and I intend to do more research and experimentation.
We also learnt that it is not easy to get the answers you are hoping for when conducting interviews, we realised that there needs to be lots of thought and careful planning when writing questions and there needs to be room for change if the answers you receive are not exactly what you were expecting.