Preliminary Radio Task

Evaluation

Video Evaluation:



• In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
My media product was designed to be a demonstration of the skills needed to capture, edit and produce a full length news broadcast and in doing so, follow a set of forms and conventions that determined features such as the synthesizer sound used in the opening jingle to the sex of presenter that I used in the sport report. These conventions stretched further than simply the layout of the show's contents, but into the tone of voice with which I presented the show, and the wording of the script that I provided for all 'characters' in my production. There is a generally well-spoken stereotype to news reporters and in as many cases as possible, I tried to keep to this convention. There are however a few areas in which I feel I have developed the set forms of a radio broadcast. During the OB report with 'Tom Stenton', I decided to place Tom in the thick of the crowd alongside an elderly woman whom he was scheduled to interview. Despite often having riot reports etc. on modern radio news reports, I have never come accross a radio reporter being that close to the actual drama of the protest and having an in depth coversation with a member of the crowd. I chose to do this in order to give both sides of the story a fair representation. In nearly every single story of this kind in any modern day media, a large organisation is represted by one, well spoken individual, where as the opposing protesters are given the image of a much larger and more aggressive force that has no 'face' and therefore is very difficult to side with. In this format however, an element of sympathy and personal involvement is brought is so that the protesters may be taken more notice of.

• How does your media product represent particular social groups?
My media product was designed to be attractive and suitable to all age, sex, religion and social groups seeing as it is not an objective view in anyway, but is instead a presentation of information gathered by the show's research team. However, during the interviews taken place in the show, there are some stereotypes addressed and particularly the older generation of people are dealt with as a 'social group' of old age pensioners trying to enjoy a retired lifestyle. The show doesn't prepresent these people as grumpy or angry, but expresses their general attitude towards causes of loud noise or disruption of their household.

• What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Being a radio show. there is only one real type of media istitution that could distribute or use my product. becoming more specific in terms of exactly which types of radio stations could use my product is likely to be more useful information. I decided to script and set out my broadcast as if from a local, reigonal station that would be broadcast to thousands rather than hundreds of thousands! The nature of the news reports, the focus of the sport report and the relevance of a 'local rising tennis star' would all be misplaced on a station such as Radio 1. I believe a small station such as 103fm or KMFM would be interested in the show as it is based largely upon their material in the first place and so would fit in well.

• Who would be the audience for your media product?
The main audience for my product would be the population of the local town or city that the radio station would be broadcast throughout. The general layout of the news report conforms to most codes and conventions of other radio shows including national stations such as Radio 1 and so could very easily be applied to a much larger audience with a simple change of news content. There is no specific age range, gender or social class that the show is targeted towards and so the scope for gathering large percentages of the total population as au audience for the show is a very real one.

• How did you attract/address your audience?
Through the extensive target audience research that I collected, I gathered that although it was a very broad range of potential listeners, the largest segment of those sampled were 31 to 45 year old females. What they enjoyed most when listening to the (local) radio was celebrity, local and oddly enough, sports news. It was also apparent that the majority seemed to listen to the radio most often when in the car, so drive time shows would be the most popular. I took this information and although I couln't govern when my production would be played, I could govern the content and so Introduced a local riot story, A sport report and a mixture of the two with a slight celebrity element in the form of an interview with an up and coming tennins star.

• What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Previously, I had never used Garageband for anything more than experimenting with loops and adding sound effects etc. to existing songs on the school macs. This project has broadened my knowledge of the software a great deal and I have started to use it for tasks outside of the school based projects such as editing and adding effects to sound clips to add into film projects I am making. Aside from the new found knowledge of using GarageBand on the macs, I have discovered the usefulness of the tool on which I am writing now...Blogger! As it is accessable from the school network, I have found it increasingly useful to use as a safe storage place for images and documents relating to homework at school. The use of a pen drive to transport important work to and from school is a risky one as it could easily be misplaced, broken or corrupted. Saving work on Blogger has none of these negative attributes.

• Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
In terms of the use of GarageBand, The preliminary task asked us only to construct a radio 'jingle' that required no insertion of externally recorded sound clips, no real necessity to use the "musical keys" feature to create original material and the whole production was a lot shorter lasting roughly 5-20 seconds as apposed to the full product requiring around 5 minutes of material. This step up in required knowledge of the software being used forced me into gaining a more in depth knowledge of what exactly radio stations go through to obtain a professional and smooth sounding show to be able to replicate this in my own production.

My Broadcast

I apologise for the quality of Blogger's uploads!

Production of the broadcast 3

Now to the production of the main broadcast! This again was not without it's problems as the first full production became corrupt when close to completion, but this gave me the opportunity to learn from my mistakes and produce a better quality product overall:














This is the start up screen to the almighty GarageBand. Seeing as I already had the existing file from producing my jingle, I simply built upon this small piece and so, selected 'Open as existing project' from this menu. The next step was to then make an index of all the sound clips I wanted to incorporate into the piece in iTunes.















I first created a new playlist, imaginatively named 'joel' to house my new directory of clips that would be my source file from now on. Using iTunes directly rather than working from a standard file on my flash drive or on the computer's desktop enabled me to preview clips before insertion and convert awkward clips to AAC format which usually worked when the occasional '.mov' or '.wav' file played up. This was an invaluable tool during the process of production and saved me a
huge amount of time.


















No sooner had I finally started to slot sound clips into place, than I was back searching through 'loops'. This time, the purpose was to find a repetitive yet modern and minimalistic sounding background melody to lay over the top of the initial presenter introduction to give it a fuller and more professional sound. The clip turned out like this:


This was very easy to make as it was simply a case of selecting three seperate loops that I felt fit well together, and then laying them over the top of each other and bringing them in with slight fades.

After a few more sound clip inserts, the next challenge was to create a realistic sounding riot to lay over the top of 'Tom Stenton's OB Report. I did this by utilising a 5 second clip found on iMovie of a 'booing crowd'. To make this very short clip last the full length of the two speaking clips needed, I first tried repeating the clip in a uniform way but it sounded too regular and unlike a real crowd. I therefore split the clip up into segments and alternated these segments to make an irregular pattern to include occasional whistles, along with louder and quieter patches. Once I had created a clip length that I was satisfied with, I could now simply repeat this clip over and again without it sounding fake.





The next stage of the production was one of fine tuning rather than of structural development. When moving onto the volume leveling of my product, there were two tools that were in use most; the master volume indicator located in the bottom right of the GarageBand window and the individual track volume sliders displayed as an arrow on each track's menu on the left of the window. Clicking this arrow will reverse it and reveal a drop-down menu that contains a thick blue shuded area below the track in question. The width of this blue section indicates the volume of the track. In the picture below, it is clearly visible where I have used fades and which tracks are naturally louder that required me to lower the overall volume to keep a constant volume throughout.














Once finished leveling out all of the un-even volume spots to create a professional sound relieved of blemishes, The final task was to take an overview of the whole product and play it right the way through several times to spot any slight mistakes that I could then zoom in on and sort out.















So, I now had a finalised product with all sound clips inserted, all sound effects blended in and all volume levels at a satisfactory constant level. What to do next?...export!















Using the GarageBand toolbar at the top of the screen, clicking on the 'Share' icon will release a drop down menu containing the option to 'Export song to disk'. Selecting this feature will present the oportunity to save the project as a finalised .mp3 file in a range of qualities, along with their estimated file sizes. The project is now COMPLETE!

Production of the broadcast 2

Gathering the Material was the next step to the production of my broadcast. This was done over a few days with a little help from a few members of friends and family. To make the broadcast as authentic as possible, I decided immediately that I would need a range of people to feature as members of the radio show team as well as guests to be interviewed. The first to be 'roped in' to my broadcast was my grandmother in the role of 'Margaret Myer' in the powerplant story featured first:

I felt this was a very successful interview as it was carefully scripted along with my grandma being interviewed putting an authentic tone of voice on to the whole piece.

The next story to address was a sports reporter. I decided to go with a female sports reporter as there are more and more female sports reporters appearing in modern day media and I was aiming to make this as authentic as possible. I asked a friend of mine named Kate to rehearse a short script that I had written the day before I wanted to record and then used the portable sound recorder I had been leant by my media dept. to record her in a quiet room with good acoustics. Next up was Sophie who stepped in a Susan to do an interview with 'Matthew Colborn' played by a young friend names Samuel.

The sound recorder it's self is a small, hand held device that captures extraordinary quality sound clips. This Olympus WS-321M was used to record every vocal element of my production. I tried especially hard to record every sound clip in the same room so that the general sound levels and acoustic properties of the clip would be similar.

After capturing all the individual clips I needed, The next task was to then upload them to an apple mac in the media suite, where I could then begin compiling and editing the clips together into one single, seemless broadcast. This was very easy in many respects, but was not without it's problems. The sound recorder I used throughout was a very cleverly designed unit that incorporated a hidden USB output so that any clips could be immediately transferred to a PC.That however, was also the problem as the unit had been designed solely for PC's and so recorded all clips in WMA (windows media audio) which was not recognised as an audio file at all by the mac's that I needed to use for editing. I therefore needed to convert the files into WAV (waveform audio) files that the mac would recognise.

Production of the broadcast 1

The first stage of the production of my radio broadcast was to construct an opening jingle that the show could begin with. As I was constructing this solely on GarageBand, I didn't want to simply use 'loops', but instead construct an original melody with the help of loops for accompaniment to create a fuller, more professional sound. The first step of this was to open up a new garage band project and display the 'musical keys' feature.









This enabled me to use the ordinary computer keyboard as an on-screen musical one to create and then record an original melody. Using existing radio and television news broadcasts as inspiration, I decided upon a synthesizer sound that I wanted to use for my melody and initially begun to immitate jingles that I had already heard in existance. This soon lead to me changing certain notes and eventually ending up with my own melody which was this:




Once i had this, I decided to bulk out the sound with a few radio sound that looked like this:

Planning

Below I have included screen shots of both the script I have devised and also a basic timeline of how I will carry out the 5minute broadcast. The script gives in depth detail of what each character will be saying, whilst the timeline will give a more general overview.

Timeline:

For the script, I divided the show up into sections in terms of stories and reporters. In total there were 5 sections. In order, they formed:
1. The introduction and welcome
2. Powerplant story (inc. vox pop & O.B)
3. Sport Report
4. Interview With Matthew (inc. recorded interview)
5. Dismissal and song to play out

To make it more 'blogger friendly', I have combined all text into one continuous stream below:

Joel - Presenter"Hello and welcome to the morning news with me Joel Wroe-Johnson. Now, for you today we have live coverage of a riot that has broken out at the Trinsdale powerplant, with our outside broadcaster Tom Stenton. We have a full report of our boys in national sports, and a new rising tennis star Matthew Colborn comes in for a quick chat. Now, Tom, what is the situation down there at the powerplant?

Tom - OB Reporter "Morning Joel! I am here in the middle of the crowd with protesters al around me. The aim of this protest is to make the managerial staff in charge of the plant re think their plans to spend over 5 million pounds of tax payer's money on a new extension as well as extending the already substantial operating hours, a further 3 hours per day. Now, I have been chatting to one protester that has lived in the area for the past 23 years and has seen this site turn from a sheep inhabited field, to a small locally run plant, to the looming figure that stands before us today. Despite many hundreds of complaints and countless filings for law suits, her voice has gone unheard in the battle to stop this major energy company disrupting her retired lifestyle with ever increasing loads passing close by her front door. Margaret, what has it been like living in an area that has changed so dramatically over the past few years?"

Margaret - Protester " Well I would just love to say that I am proud to still be a resident here in Trinsdale as I used to be just a few years ago. Now though it is a totally different place! I just don't recognize the place that I live anymore... the new roads, the increased traffic, the new people they have brought in to work here! The new housing they have built for the workers...And it's silly little things that are the worst like the fact that past 3 o clock, no sunlight whatsoever falls on my house, those hideous towers block it totally, which in the summer, means that I cannot simply relax in my garden with a book, I have to go down to the local park, which at my age, is not easy at all!"

Tom "And what measures have you taken to stop these plans taking place?"

Margaret " Well! This Raleigh was an absolute last resort that we have been pushed into. We have made countless petitions before the last extension as well as this one, some 5000 strong! (angered) IGNORED... We have tried emailing, ringing, posting letters…EVERYTHING! They just don’t seem to care about the town in which they are making all this money."

Tom "This must be very frustrating for you, has the energy provider responsible never so much as aknowledged the town's uphappiness?"

Margaret "Never once! there have been no polite notices, no warnings of major changes or deliveries that are going to come in the night and wake up the town! It is just disgraceful in my opinion."

Tom "Mrs.Myer, thankyou very much for your time. So Joel, as you can hear, it is rather heated down here so I am going to be gathering some other people's views on the matter as well as trying to get to talk to the site manager of this plant soon."

Joel "Tom Stenton live at Trinsdale powerplant. Now, for the sport with Katie Sanders."

Katie Sanders - Sport Reporter " Thanks Joel. Now, in local cricket, our county boys have been doing rather well. They took 6 wickets today against Surrey county in an exciting game that finished with Surrey ending the day on a below par 156 for 6. In local football we have retained our place in the league despite coming up against the favorites’ for the year, Blackburn Rovers. The game ended on a two all draw which is all the guys needed to stay put in the table. Now, on the theme of sport we have a rising star in the studio with Susan…"

Susan " Thanks Katie, here with me today is a rising star in the British tennis scene, Matthew Colborn. He has not only wiped the floor in local competitions, but gone on to win the British Championship Final in his age range and has his heart set on more! Matthew, thank you for coming in today young man!

Matthew Colborn - Tennis Star "thats alright!"

Susan "Now what exactly is the title you have won?"

Matthew " Erm, well it’s basically the British Junior National Champs run by the LTA"

Susan "Fantastic! Now what influenced you to get into tennis?"

Matthew "Well both of my parents play a lot of tennis, so I was encouraged to get into it at a very early age and had the opportunity to practice every weekend for the last few years"

Susan "Wow, so you were very lucky in that sense!"

Matthew " Yeah, really lucky, Thanks dad!"

Susan "I’m sure he’s very proud of you right now. So the big question is Matthew, what’s next?"

Matthew " Well I’m training pretty much every day at the moment. I get home from school and just go straight to the courts and my coach Steven Morris is helping me to get into shape for the Wimbledon Junior trials in a few months, so…I’m confident!"

Susan "Well I will look out for you popping up on my TV in the next few weeks! Matthew it’s been a pleasure to chat to you and after finally meeting you, I’m sure you will take that Wimbledon title in years to come. Right, now in honour of our young guest, we asked him what his favourite song was. But i’m warning you, its a mellow one so you may have to stop what you’re working on for a second, look out at the sunshine and just relax…"