Back | Final work | Evaluation
The Brief
As a group you must produce a radio documentary piece. The topic is optional and must be 5 minutes long.
Statement of Intent
Our group consists of myself, Phil Shakesby and Micheal Wilkinson. As this was a group exercise we all put in ideas to what kind of radio documentary we wanted to make. We decided as a group to document how the current economic decline is affecting students. We plan to interview students, student services, lecturers and the dean of Hull School of Art and Design on how the recession is affecting the lack of employment opportunities and student finances. We will also research current articles about the recession and education so the information we are stating in our documentaryis factual.
The needs of the intended programme
- To inform the listener how the recession has affected students
Intended Audience
- Students
- Non-Students
- Radio 4 Demographic
The style of the piece
- Informative
Research
As a group we all listened online to radio documentaries from Radio 4, paying particular attention to the structure and composition of them.
I researched some online articles which covered the recession and the affect on education. They can be found here:
Article 1: Why public sector careers are more attractive than ever
Article 2: Your finances in the balance
Article 3: Its boom time on the wards thanks to the recession
Article 4: Distance learning up close
Once we had decided what radio advert we were going to produce we went away individually and started brainstorming. Phil Shakesby wrote a brief script of how the radio trailer would be structured.
Myself and Sam did some brainstorming on the name of the Radio Station. The name of the radio station had to be quite prominent within the advert so it would communicate to the listener that this was a concert in conjunction with the station (similar to radio ones big weekend) and to brand the station properly.
As a group we all looked at the script and decided on things to add/change and agree on. Everyone gave their feedback on the radio station names we had come up with and we eventually decided on RADIO DASH.
Once our script was complete, we all hired voice recorders and went away individually to start to record parts of the script. We tried out different ways of saying the script; we all exchanged sound files and commented on each other’s attempts of the script.
As Phil is a DJ and has more experience in using sound mixing programs he took charge in putting together the first sample. We all got a copy of this sample and worked out different parts of the advert.
I personally worked on the radio station jingle. After studying other radio adverts I had noticed a conventional style with vocals. Often a mans voice is followed by and echo of a woman’s voice, I attempted to create this with our radio station jingle “Radio dash – music for your ears” As phils voice had been chosen to say Radio Dash I used a clip of my voice to follow. I opened it up in audition, listened to the audio and highlighted which part I wanted to use. Using the right click option I chose to trim the selection. I made sure before trimming that their was no pop or clicks before or after which interfered with the audio. I used the echo FX in the multitrack view and because the audio was quite quiet I increased the volume by highlighting the audio and using the volume toggle. I was very pleased with the result.
We came up with a few problems along the way when producing our audio. In the final week before the hand-in date unfortunately Phil’s laptop broke and we lost the final copy of the audio. We learnt by this as the only copy was kept on Phil’s USB and myself, Sam or Sarah did not have a back-up copy. In future we will ensure we have more than one copy.
Because of this we had to begin the audio again, fortunately we all had copies of different clips used within the audio so we all took it in turns to complete the audio at home to its full final piece. We also added in a few other effects our teacher Jay Moy had suggested. One of these was adding panning to my audio clip of the band performance list and a small reverb. I first cut down my clip so there wasn’t any unnecessary silence either end of the clip and using the panning tool in multitrack view I adjusted it so that one band went to the left ear and the other to the right, in a sequence. I added a small reverb using the FX tools in multitrack view.
Did our project work out as planned?
Yes, I am very pleased on how the final advert sounds. I think we found it hard to work as a group assignment as we all had very different ways in which we imagined the radio advert to sound like. After Phil made his first sample, although we loved it myself and the rest of the group realised how differently we had imagined it to sound in our heads when we had first brainstormed the idea. Once we realised this we decided it was for the best that one person had taken charge of the audio as if we had each done different sections it wouldn’t have mixed together very well.
Could it be improved?
In the future if we ever do a group assignment again with audio it might be a good idea, when brainstorming ideas to also talk about how we imagine the audio to sound. If we had all come up with separate scripts and then chose the one we liked the most we perhaps could have all worked on different parts of the audio. For example, the beginning, middle and end.
I also felt that some people in the group did more work than the others which was quite unfair and in the future the workload needs to be shared out more evenly
Sarah Aylward | Copyright ©