We have begun our next project: Factual Radio
Production. We have been fortunate enough to gain the assistance of radio
presenter Ed Stag who will use his experience and expertise to guide us through
this section of the course. He set us a project brief so that we know
what we are aiming for the duration of this unit. Our brief is as follows:
I'd
like to commission a 60-minute (roughly) programme to air on a fictitious radio
station, the name of which will be decided by the students. The programme title
will also be decided between them.
This 60 minute programme will focus positively
on life at Bluecoat Academy as seen by the students who are commissioned to
produce the elements being broadcast. It will contain a distinct mix of
material which would appeal to students, parents and teachers and will be based
primarily in fact. An element of artistic license can be used to achieve a more
professional sound, effect or to add drama. The target is to inform, educate
and surprise through creative use of audio and treatment. Each student will be
responsible for 7.5 minutes of output and there should be an even spread of
subjects creating a cohesive programme flow.
In this first session we listening to Ed and
gaining advise from him. He talked about how he go into doing radio and what he
enjoys the most about being a radio presenter, he showed us how to take simple,
maybe boring story and create a treatment with the hope of turning it into an
interesting piece of radio. Ed suggested that we should focus on
fulfilling the questions "Who, what, when where and why?" in
journalism since this will give us the best possible coverage of the story.
Ed showed us how to make a relatively boring story
into something interesting and how to engage the audience. He gave use some ideas
on how to develop the story, some of his ideas are as follows:
- Fill one minute with pre recorded content
including effects and music to grab the audience`s attention.
- Include a vox to gain
the opinions of others and to add an additional dimension to
the show.
- Ask an interesting question "Who would
you not go with?"
- Try to "change gear" to keep your
audience interested.
After thinking about it for a long time we all
came up with the name BlueSpoke for our radio station. We also came up with the Corporate Feel of “Blue spoke” which are as follows:
Our aim is to make a professional, up-to-date and exiting program that
appeals to students, parents and teachers. It will be informative and
interesting, incorporating our tastes as well as the views and opinions of
others. We will achieve this by;
· -Doing market research into our
audience.
· -Following the codes and
conventions of radio.
· -Including: vox pop/phone
in/debates
· - Being factual
· - Being topical
Target audience:
Students-Both sexes
From all over Nottingham Darby/ Linkestion
Topical issues:
Change to A levels/best GCSE grades/ 100%A level pass rate
Knife crime
Horsemeat scandal-school meals
Sports-football-forest-school football team
Trams-road works/girl killed
New film releases
Concerts coming to Capital Arena
Possible Ideas: About Bluecoat-Positive light
1. Sport in Bluecoat & success (Maqsood)
2. Exam success (Nicole)
3. News related to Education (Deniz)
4. Updates- MACs- Dance
studio-Photography- Wollaton (Dieter)
5. Clubs & enrichment (not
sports) (Josh)
6. Animal Farm & other plays (Sam)
7. Africa Trip- South Africa/
International links (Edna)
8. School Teachers (Jessica)
13/03/2013- Make a questionnaire with all the class, we thought of the questions by thinking of what answers we wanted to hear. In period 2 we went out of class to interview students while lesson changeover was happening. We then made our Pitch ideas, so we could tell them to Ed in the afternoon. While we were waiting to see Ed, we added to our research bank looking at factual radio shows. When i saw Ed I read my pitch to him and then he gave his feedback my idea. He really liked the fact that I wanted to get funny experiences from students and I wanted to tell people how to raise money, and how the Christian charities help. He told me to start off with the students interview be more interesting. The more interviews I get it would be better because if I get a lot of good things It will be better than a little bad things. Then I went back to doing the research bank.
15/03/2013- Today I was planning my show minute by
minute, so I know exactly what I'm doing in the and emailing teachers if they
could be interviewed.
19/03/2013- Today we were learning
different interviewing techniques for example look at the notes on
iPad.
we then went into 2 groups of 4 and got
a recorder and interviewed each other, to try and make each
other more comfortable about interviewing people.
I then listen to my interview i did and wrote down
a few notes on how to improve my next interview
I also cheaked my email and saw that Mrs Corsie's
email "Hi, you can find me in the Languages
office which is in LA02 or I may be in LA01 next door packing!
See you tomorrow, Mrs
Corsie."
20/03/2013- Today in period 1 I
created a production schedule, made questions for my interviews,
In period 2 I interviewed 3, people
and got interviewed by other people myself.
In period 4 I was getting my
questions ready of Mrs Corsie about International links in Bluecoat
and travailing over to the WPC
In period 5 I was interviewing Mrs
Corsie. we were in the staff room so there was a bit of noise going on, doors
shutting people talking and even on of the teachers was
hammering something into the wall.
21/03/2013-I uploaded my footage from the recorder,
made my plan and started to writ my script.
22/03/2013 Today I was finishing my script and recording
a few more interviews asking people "If you were to go to
any country in the world with school what would it be?"
26/03/2013- Today I was recording my script bit, I also interviewed Macsood about if you were to go to any trip with school where would you go? I also asked miss why do you think school organises these trips? I got Deniz to speak Turkish and helped Nicole record her jingle and script.
27/03/2013- Today I rerecorded my
bit because I don't think it sounded as well as it should. I was recording with
Nicole as I was helping her and she was helping me, we had to make sure the
room wasn't echoey and had to cheack the sound levels with, one of us listening
through headphones. I then put the audio tracks onto my computer. After-that I
went through all the footage listened to them and renamed all of the files
acrding to whats in the audio. This is very important
as when you are editing you don't get confused and you know what exactly is in
the file.
At break I interviewed my friend Aimee about
the Africa trip she is going on with school.
I recorded this on my iPad using the app called 'Recording Lite'.
At lunchtime I interviewed a girl called Kera
about the Africa trip she is going on. I also voxed some people with
the question asking "If yo were to go on a trip abroad with school where
would you go?" and go a lot of response.
In period 4 I uploaded all my footage I got
at break and lunch-time from my iPad from recording Lite on to
my camera role and from there into my dropbox, I can then get all my recordings
from any computer in the world.
In period 5 I had a discussion with Ed Stagg
about how my project is going. He though I was doing very well and thought my
radio section will turn out pretty well. He said I will
have to cut out a lot of bits from interviews as I have a lot of footage. But
it is better to have a lot of interviews than only a few.
He also said that I should try and mix it up a bit,
not just have it in a simple order but to make it more interesting.
28/03/2013- Today I stated I uses Audacity to
export the files so I could the use my audio recordings in Cubase
Essential 5
15/04/2013- Started editing today, had to rerecord
some of my script coz I couldn't find it in the folder, or the recorder.
16/04/2013- was editing today, my voice only, started off editing one of the interviews with a student (Jessica)
17/04/2013- Today I was editing my radio show all
day! I've made quite a lot of progress in it. I edited the If you could go to
any trip abroad with school where would you go bit, I put all the answers into
a montage. edited the tips for Africa and what they want to see the most
in Africa. Mrs corsi's interview. Had a lot of difficulty, because when it was
zoomed out, it wouldn't start playing where the grey bits were but after it was
lagging, found it difficult to edit like that. I spent a bit of time trying to
fix it, but couldn't, so just had to got with it.
18/04/2013- Today I was editing, I
finished editing my Africa interviews, added in Aimee's interview, also sorted the
volume out coz Maria and Kera were too loud and Aimee too quite. Took Ed's
advice from yesterday and took a bit of the were would you go answer out coz it
repeats the question which is not needed.
19/04/2013- Had to recut jess and Dieter’s interview, coz they disappeared somehow. Cut a bit more of Mr's Corsie's interview. Put everything together, as close as possible, It's Way TOO LONG! Around 12 minutes long, need to be cut to 7:30 mins. Next lesson I really need to cut a lot of stuff down. I've done the basic 1st cut. need to add in all the jingles and stingers and music.
22/04/2013-Gotit to 7:10 mins, so there is enough space for stingers and jingles. I added some stingers and jingles, still need to add a backing track to the whole thing and sort the levels out of the volume. Had to take a lot of stuff out of the program to make space like edited jess and dieters interview together, took some of Mrs corsis interview out and took some student stuff out
23/04/2013-Today I continued
editing my radio show and Ed Stagg came it to see how we were all doing with
our individual radio shows. I asked Ed to listen to my show so far and give me
some feedback and this is what he told me:
-Change some of the stingers as
they don’t really go with the interviews and don’t make sense.
-Make everything much more tyte
and compacted and to also get rid of any unnecessary “umms” to seem more
exiting, quick and snappy for the audience.
-Cut in certain places of an
interview and add bits of myself speaking about the interview, and then put the
rest of the interview back. This will make the radio show unpredictable and
will break the interviews up and will give the audience a change of voice.
-Add music to the interviews that
talk about Africa and France from those countries, so the audience and feel the
atmosphere and can seem as if they are there as they hear the interview.
-Build the music up. Bring it in
before the actual interview comes in so the audience can get use to the music and
aren’t shocked when it comes in suddenly.
-Listen to different music intros
as you can get good stingers/jingles out of them.
As you can see, Ed gave me a lot
of good and helpful advice and I’m sure I’m going to be using most of this and
taking all of it into consideration, it defiantly got me thinking.
24/04/2013-Today I had creative media all day so I was working non-stop. I firstly had to re-record something I had to add to my show. So in order to do that I had to add bit into my script and record them, myself and another person from my class (who also needed to re-record something)got a recorder and tried to find a quite room to record in that didn’t echo. We firstly went into the recording studio, but then later on heard that someone was playing drums next door, so we had to move. After wondering around school for a bit trying to find a room that didn’t echo, we finally found one and recorded ourselves speaking. While one of us were recording our voice, the other would be listening through the head phones to make sure it sounded good and gave each other advice like “Speak louder” or “say that line again and clearer” I think it’s always good to have someone there when your recording your voice as they can give you advice and help you if needed. I then exported my new recordings onto my Mac; this took a long time as it took time to load the audio from the recorded to the Mac and was very slow in doing so. I then had to cut the new audio I just recorded, so I only had the good bit and deleted the rubbish ones. After doing that, I then placed the new bits of audio were they would go, i.e in the middle of interviews.
I then played with the audio of
the recordings as my voice in the bits that I just added onto the radio show
were too quiet and I could barely hear myself, so to solve this I put my bits
of speech to the maximum volume it would go, that still seemed too quiet for
the radio show. I just thought it would be better to leave the volume of the
recordings alone for a while and come back to it later and see if new ideas
come to me, to fix the problem.
I edited my radio show so the bit
right at the end where I have myself saying “Thanks for listening” and then
have different people saying it in different languages after me would come
before myself saying it. So the audience would hear my voice right at the end
so they know that this was my show and that I had my own voice and not someone
else saying “Thanks for listening” for me.
I then was searching different
music to suite my interviews. One of my interviews is about the Africa trip
that the sixth form students take. For this interview I was finding some
traditional African music to put in the background to create an atmosphere of
Africa. I searched YouTube to get the music. I found this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8rsEodZ8tc
music to put in the background of the Africa trip interviews, I used YouTube
converter http://www.listentoyoutube.com/index.php
to convert the YouTube video into an MP3 audio. I think it really captures the
mood and feel of Africa and really do think that it creates a good atmosphere
and it will take people to Africa when they hear it. For another one of my interviews,
they talk about France, so to create the atmosphere of that trip, I thought
that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYZ8tqxJAQ0
would be the perfect piece of music to make people feel as if they are in
France and as soon as you listen to this music I feel as if I am in France.
After converting both these pieces of music on YouTube converter and
downloading them, I added them onto my radio show on Cubase and cut them into
how Long I needed them and added them underneath the interviews.
Later I, went back to the problem I was having before with
the audio I recorded beforehand in the day. I asked my teacher if she knew how
to solve the problem, but she only knew what I already know about putting the
volume up. So as I couldn’t up the volume up in the editing, I had to re-record
the bits I just added. This time I made
sure my mouth was right next to the recorder and made sure I was nice and loud
when speaking. I then had to export the recordings I did, which again took a
long time.
I found that there were a lot of
problems today and it very frustrating to deal with them because each time I
thought I was getting closer to finishing and meeting the deadline which is the
26/04/2013 a lot of problems keep on getting in the way. But tomorrow I will
hopefully get a lot done as I have today and will be one more step closer to
finishing.
25/04/2013- Today I started off cutting the new audio.
I was very upset of the fact that I had to recut everything and put in all that
effort in again. I asked Mr Collins if he knew how to turn up the volume of the audio, he did know (Life Saver). He showed me how to do it, select the audio, make the player line on the selected audio, then click "audio", "Process" and "gain" to 11.0db, preview it, then process. I did that to each ones that needed it, and made sure they sounded the same.
26/04/2013- Today I came in early to finish my radio show off, as today is the deadline. I started off my finding a backing track for my show and finding better stingers and jingles. I got a a backing track from youtube and had to use youtube converter to convert the video into a MP3 and downloaded it. I then put that track into Cubase and because it was karaoke version, I had to cut the vocal bits out of the track so it is now all instrumental. I put it underneath the interviews and in the bits where I was talking. I asked Mr Collins to look over all my radio show, she helped me adjusted all the audio so was consistent with each other. I then exported my Radio Show.
