I contributed to the task in numerous ways during our group project. I think it was very important that we all put in individual effort as well as productive team-work to come away with the best results.
This begins by doing a wide range of individual planning and research, then bringing this solo work to the team to discuss and improve. We all participated well with this, for example I would go away and make notes on a local radio station such as ‘96.5 Bolton FM’ and compare my findings to what Liam had discovered about a national station such as ‘Heart FM’ so we can analyse key differences and which aspects we want to use for our own station. I would say how 'local radio presenters connect with their audience better, as they deal with local topics and in this normally have presenters from the local area' and Liam would come back with 'but national stations have more advanced software for a sharper editing process' and we'd take the positives from both situations to enhance our own work.
With our preliminary task we all took on major roles to master individual skills to bring to the team. I focused on presenting skills with microphone work. As we were still learning, there was lots of room for improving after our preliminary, but as a learning curve this greatly helped us. I learnt I needed to speak softer into the mike and stop static sounds and ‘dead air’ moments.
As me moved onto the final piece I wanted a more all-round approach to the work so began focusing on editing as well as the recording. We used Audacity, which I spent time practising on and learning how to cut and move sound segments. Again we all put in individual work, but by bringing these ideas to the team meetings we had a lot of group input and evolution of our ideas.
During our research for news stories I frequently watched the news and checked stories online for inspiration. I decided we wanted a mix of light-hearted and serious, powerful stories that would interest our target audience of teenagers to young adults, who are at the stage of enjoying ‘fun’ stories while having moral obligations to care about the world. I suggested to my group we cover the John Terry affair and Hati stories, as the juxtaposition of stories was exactly what we were looking for.
From here we moved onto the recording stages of our final piece, as I stated, I wanted to much more involved with the editing and technical stages of this and so I was. I became a more confident user of Audacity and introduced snippets of jingle in-between headlines. I also kept presenting, and felt my voice was more professional to a news show. I studied the presenting skills of professionals such as Trevor McDonald and spoke softer, yet with authority, into the mike. I think tone was very important as we needed the balance between ‘jokey’ attitudes enjoyed by our young target audience and serious and respectful voices to justify our serious stories.
I believe I contributed well to the task and was part of an effective team that pulled all our ideas together to create our radio segment.
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Evaluation
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
After much research of many media institutions and the radio shows they play, I have concluded that a local light-hearted radio station such as BBC Oxford or Jack FM would distribute our radio show. It is common for local stations to broadcast local dialects (and we are all native to Oxfordshire) This became apparent during my research into 95.6 Bolton FM. And we mix local and national stories, such as our coverage of the local mans crocodile farm contrasted with our coverage of Haiti.
http://www.jackfm.co.uk/
This link to Jack FM will allow you to listen to the similarities of our broadcast and theirs. These local stations build better relationships with their listeners as they present to a smaller number of people who get more input via phone-ins and competitions.
Who would be the audience for your media product? And how does it represent particular social groups?
Our target audience will be teenagers to young adults, 15 to 24. Most who I assume will be local to Oxfordshire. We represent young Oxfordians by being them ourselves. A lot of our stories, such as the John Terry affair are light hearted and relevant to popular culture. This is entwined with serious stories that interest and challenge our audience’s views. Despite this, as a news segment we would hope to have a large variety of audience to address due to most people wanting the news to keep up to date with the world. This is proven by ‘The news at Ten’ being one of the most viewed programs in history and that news has spread to more niche markets such as children with ‘News Round’ and music lovers with ‘Kerrang News’. The Cultivation Theory tells us how the media is such an important source of information that consumers find it ultimately impossible to escape it's gradual encroachment on their everyday lives- this again will increase our viewing figures.
How did you attract/address your audience?
If our radio segment was a daily show, we would attract our audience through local mediated advertisement. There is no point spending millions of pounds on national advertisement for a local radio show, so I would focus on Poster and possible local TV/Radio Adverts in the Oxfordshire area.
Our Jingle will also attract our audiences. It has been theorised that a person can become attracted to a jingle if they hear it enough time though the mediated Syringe Theory. An example of this would be an individual recognising the theme music to Eastender and feeling an urge to go watch. Our jingle would work in a similar way for our audience, if they are browsing through radio stations and get a blast of our jingle, they will stop and listen in. This will fundamentally raise our profile.
Furthermore I would attract audience through advertising, especially through the Syringe Theory of playing our adverts locally over and over and the Two Step Flow Theory of allowing our media consumers to discuss our show amongst themselves and hopefully attract new consumers to tune in.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Through the construction of our radio piece we came into contact with many new technologies and media instruments.
The key program we used was the computer program ‘Audacity’. Created by Dominic Mazzoni, this simple yet effective program recorded our voices through microphones and then allowed us to edit. The editing process consisted to cutting and lengthening voice segments and overlapping them with backing sounds such as quieter music or ‘buzzing and disjointed' effect used in our Haiti story to represent technical problems that would occur while broadcasting a piece of news from another country.
Over the course of our project I have learnt to master Audacity as well as other instruments such as the microphones, handheld voice recorders and even video cameras when filming an evaluation video.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
I and my group have come a long way since our preliminary. In our preliminary we were still learning how to use programs such as Audacity and had technical difficulties in the editing phases. While speaking into the mike we were too loud and didn’t do enough to stop disturbances. I think as a learning curve the preliminary can still be seen as a success as it did teach us the basics and pushed us to achieve and do better for our final piece.
Our final piece is much better flowing with many more technical skills such as an improved jingle, sound effects between headlines and our ‘buzzing’ effect in our Haiti voxpop. Our presenting skills are also much improved, with our voice tones suited to a News environment.
As a group our time management excelled from our preliminary, as we met up frequently in own free time to record and edit.
I think the progress we made can be put down to our excelled effort and understanding of preparation as we shared ideas, researched stories and scripted; our recording as we were more experienced and progressed through trial and error and finally our postproduction, spending a lot of time editing on Audacity to achieve our final piece.
After much research of many media institutions and the radio shows they play, I have concluded that a local light-hearted radio station such as BBC Oxford or Jack FM would distribute our radio show. It is common for local stations to broadcast local dialects (and we are all native to Oxfordshire) This became apparent during my research into 95.6 Bolton FM. And we mix local and national stories, such as our coverage of the local mans crocodile farm contrasted with our coverage of Haiti.
http://www.jackfm.co.uk/
This link to Jack FM will allow you to listen to the similarities of our broadcast and theirs. These local stations build better relationships with their listeners as they present to a smaller number of people who get more input via phone-ins and competitions.
Who would be the audience for your media product? And how does it represent particular social groups?
Our target audience will be teenagers to young adults, 15 to 24. Most who I assume will be local to Oxfordshire. We represent young Oxfordians by being them ourselves. A lot of our stories, such as the John Terry affair are light hearted and relevant to popular culture. This is entwined with serious stories that interest and challenge our audience’s views. Despite this, as a news segment we would hope to have a large variety of audience to address due to most people wanting the news to keep up to date with the world. This is proven by ‘The news at Ten’ being one of the most viewed programs in history and that news has spread to more niche markets such as children with ‘News Round’ and music lovers with ‘Kerrang News’. The Cultivation Theory tells us how the media is such an important source of information that consumers find it ultimately impossible to escape it's gradual encroachment on their everyday lives- this again will increase our viewing figures.
How did you attract/address your audience?
If our radio segment was a daily show, we would attract our audience through local mediated advertisement. There is no point spending millions of pounds on national advertisement for a local radio show, so I would focus on Poster and possible local TV/Radio Adverts in the Oxfordshire area.
Our Jingle will also attract our audiences. It has been theorised that a person can become attracted to a jingle if they hear it enough time though the mediated Syringe Theory. An example of this would be an individual recognising the theme music to Eastender and feeling an urge to go watch. Our jingle would work in a similar way for our audience, if they are browsing through radio stations and get a blast of our jingle, they will stop and listen in. This will fundamentally raise our profile.
Furthermore I would attract audience through advertising, especially through the Syringe Theory of playing our adverts locally over and over and the Two Step Flow Theory of allowing our media consumers to discuss our show amongst themselves and hopefully attract new consumers to tune in.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Through the construction of our radio piece we came into contact with many new technologies and media instruments.
The key program we used was the computer program ‘Audacity’. Created by Dominic Mazzoni, this simple yet effective program recorded our voices through microphones and then allowed us to edit. The editing process consisted to cutting and lengthening voice segments and overlapping them with backing sounds such as quieter music or ‘buzzing and disjointed' effect used in our Haiti story to represent technical problems that would occur while broadcasting a piece of news from another country.
Over the course of our project I have learnt to master Audacity as well as other instruments such as the microphones, handheld voice recorders and even video cameras when filming an evaluation video.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
I and my group have come a long way since our preliminary. In our preliminary we were still learning how to use programs such as Audacity and had technical difficulties in the editing phases. While speaking into the mike we were too loud and didn’t do enough to stop disturbances. I think as a learning curve the preliminary can still be seen as a success as it did teach us the basics and pushed us to achieve and do better for our final piece.
Our final piece is much better flowing with many more technical skills such as an improved jingle, sound effects between headlines and our ‘buzzing’ effect in our Haiti voxpop. Our presenting skills are also much improved, with our voice tones suited to a News environment.
As a group our time management excelled from our preliminary, as we met up frequently in own free time to record and edit.
I think the progress we made can be put down to our excelled effort and understanding of preparation as we shared ideas, researched stories and scripted; our recording as we were more experienced and progressed through trial and error and finally our postproduction, spending a lot of time editing on Audacity to achieve our final piece.
Audience Review
I created this questionnaire so we could get feedback from our audience. It is very helpful to see how people react to our show and to hear their opinions. Here is an example of an original questionnaire that I have put online, emailed to people and handed out hard copies at school, and one that is filled out, I had emailed to me by Ryan Banks who listened to our show.
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