Evaluation Questions

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

I feel that our local radio station is made for many types of social group. You don’t need to be from any certain culture or group to be able to listen to our radio although it does have a very modern feel to it apart form that we do try to appeal to a broad audience. The demographics that we decided upon played a huge role. We choose to use a more informal type of language in our radio, as this is local radio; we wanted it to have a more fun and friendly atmosphere. For our local radio, we thought that the best age range that would be most interested in listening to our show would be around the ages of 16 – 30 at the oldest. There is a reasonable level of banter between the presenters with Jamie being the main anchor and Annalise and I being almost like the side-kicks to Jamie. We found this quite a lot in local radio, as the woman almost seem to be there to do the more important side of the radio such as the news and weather. I still feel that this made no major impact on what social groups would follow the show, but I do feel that it allows both male and female to be able to listen and understand what is going on.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

When deciding on what type of institution would distribute our show, the types that I feel would be most interested would be such as Jack FM and Glide FM (both local shows to Oxford). Both of these are both lower budget stations compared to those such as Heart FM and Radio 1. Of course this would suit us more as it is only local radio and both also use a lot more informal language and again both of these stations choose to have banter with their listeners whilst on air. A type of institution that may be interested on having our show would perhaps be a radio station that is community funded and such, as I feel that our show creates such a warm atmosphere.

A convention of local radio that we have used is to use both local and international news, although we are only really appealing to a local radio audience, I feel that the listeners also have a right to be able to know what is going on in the wider society. I also choose not to involve sport in our news category, as this is perhaps something that not all listeners feel that what to hear on the hour every hour, so this would only be read out a number of times during the show, but we have involved regional news and then both local and international news.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

For our radio project, I have decided that I think it would best fit around the age of 16 – 30. I think this because we have decided that we want a more modern feel and friendly youngish feel to the radios station with young radio presenters. I also feel that it fits both a male and female audience, again because there isn’t just a one sex presenting team, and the type of conversation and songs that are played on air fit both genders.

I feel that our show is most likely to be played whilst in the car driving, whilst at work or even perhaps just at home, all places where you do need to be paying attention to other tasks that you are doing. This is why the news would be played every half an hour, so that people know when they need to be paying attention to the radio to know what is going on in society around them. So generally this can be listen by listeners doing all type of activities, but again I feel that it would be best benefited by the people between the age gab of 16 – 30, but that is not saying that people out of this age category couldn’t listen to the radio if they wished too.

How did you attract/ address your audience?

The main thing that I thought we needed to do was to be able to catch the audience within the first 10 seconds of our show time. This is the same with all types of media to be able to grab them and keep them interested from the moment go. For this we have put a catchy into/jingle at the start to be nice and bold and introduce the show straight away.

Other conventions that I have used to attract listeners for the show are such as; “DJ talks to themselves” I decided this would be a good convention to use as, on any radio show that you listen to you tend to get DJ’s speaking about their own lives to make the listeners feel comfortable to ring, text and tweet in about their own lives. Also when looking into all of the radios that I have analysed they all seem to use slag, not so much Heart FM, but they still do use it. I felt this was needed to let people be able to relate slightly more than if it was all so formal, and also so that the pace of the radio station flowed smoothly and at a pace rather than just plodding along.

Another main convention that we used was “DJ says what’s coming up”, again when analysing other radio stations, we found that this is done on near enough every single one, some more than others. We did this so that we can keep the listeners informed about what is coming up, in our case we did this with a brand new air play of Katy Perry’s new song Hummingbird Heartbeat and also informing the audience that we would have an up and coming artist in the studio – something that most people would be interested in listening to and finding more out about them.

A main attraction that we wanted to give to the audience, was that our radio is friendly, bubbly and welcome to pretty much anything. I tried to show this through audience to presenter banter, and also presenter to presenter banter. I feel that this is one of the main, and if not main attraction for our audience. You don’t want to listen to a radio station that is boring and just plays song after song after song, and we also realised when analysing that we didn’t want to have to listen to a lot of adverts as this bored ourselves, although we would need some to help fund the show. Conversations in the studio, and also laughter in the studio helped us best with this I feel.

If I was to do this again, I would do a survey on radio listeners, to find out what most attracts them to the station, and then work this into our script for the show.

What have you learn about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

While I have been doing this I have learnt a lot more about how to use audacity and also how to use more of logic. We used logic 9.0 as while we were using this we were able to use a far more range of effects on our final piece that if we used the equipment that the school supplied us with. We used logic to create our jingle, and also our beat that is played behind our final piece.

To create a catchy jingle was one of the main aims for our final piece, to make our jingle we added, echo, re-verb, filters and also auto tune to change the sounding of our voices. We did all of this to make it believable that we are part of a real radio station, in my opinion how we did this was very successful.

We also made the audio louder, so we made sure that we could hear our voices as presenters over all of the effects that we have added in, this is one of the most important parts. Using the two different microphones also makes our pieces sound different when different people are speaking; this was out of our control as this was what the school had provided us with.

Editing took a lot longer than what was originally anticipated, so with this we have to move a lot quicker and really get our heads down to allow us to get it done in time. We had to keep moving different pieces around to make sure that we had the order in the right order and that is sounded natural. We choose to add in a very short space of song as we thought that it would bring uplift into the end of the final piece when looking at other radio shows I felt that it died out towards the end and didn’t want to let this happen to ours.

We have taken into consideration that such equipment as the microphones are not at the highest of standard are only what the school can afford for us to be able to actually use some. We did use our own logic as the school also didn’t have this for us to use and we was able to make our final piece better using this as it allowed us to be able to a variety more of things to it.

Looking back at your Preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

I feel that I have learnt a hell of a lot from moving on from our preliminary to our final piece. Our preliminary is very quick and seems to be very childish and not to have been taken very seriously. This therefore lead us to change a lot when moving on to do our final one. We especially wanted to change how the news was done, we wanted it to be a lot more serious as to the nation it is a very serious matter. We also came to the conclusion that we came across very casual, we wanted to be able to have banter and fun in what seemed to be the studio setting but we also wanted people to be able to take us seriously and not think the show that we produce is not just some kind of joke.

How have you contributed to the planning process?

The group that i was in at the beginning of this task composed of four members but sadly one left the course. This proved more difficult than what we needed as we needed to have a driving force creating our piece. I took a lead role and the first thing we decided on getting on with was to choose a name. The next thing we had to do was write a script for our preliminary task, i wrote this as the others seemed to lack focus, particularly as one of the group had joined the course late, and i had a little more of an idea on what we needed to do and include. I discussed with the other two members of the group about the script and they both felt that it was appropriate.

We then went on to record, all of us worked together to get the equipment set up. When it came down to the final piece we all stuck to the script although the main presenter did have to improvise a little bit. This did go off subject a little bit from what we did really want. Once we had listened to it back, we decided that it would be appropriate to add in a jingle to make it more radio - like, so we did this.

We listened to it back a few times and listed what we thought would be a good idea to add in to our final piece. I came up with the idea that i thought we should add in some kind of music to liven it up as it did seem very flat and boring, So we made a background track and also added part of "Katy Perry's - Hummingbird Heartbeat". I looked up wether we could add this in or not and found out that we could put it in but it would have to be a minimal amount due to copyright laws.

When it came down to the main script the group had began slightly unsetteled and i thought it would be right to take a leading role in this as i had looked up what different aspects would need to be included. When it came down to recording our script we all stuck to what had been scripted, and we felt that this made our final piece flow alot easier than what our preliminary had. Altogether i felt that we had made a vast improvemnt from our preliminary to our final piece and feel that it shown in the work that we have produced