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.