November 2017 – Have You Heard The News- The Year In Review

November 27, 2017Simon Nunn No Comments

Lucy Mitchell

Lucy Mithcell is a post-production sound supervisor for a wide variety of clients from the BBC to commercial companies. Her lecture was based on the concept of doing a mix for a TV drama or documentary which despite not being the most relevant for my project was interesting and there was still things that could be taken from this.

In terms of making sure that time isn’t wasted she emphasised the need for setting up the studio before the ‘talent’ hasn’t arrived so that time isn’t wasted and that no one is annoyed, meaning that preamps, headphone levels and talkback are all checked , this also applies to us in the studio as we should not be wasting peoples time. The next relevant thing is the music, as she stressed that the music should be thought about carefully and the usage of it should only be applied when it is relevant and this also applies to the radio piece that I’m producing. She also stressed the need for a paint by numbers approach of doing things in a logical order to ensure that everything is done and again I would say that this is relevant and can be easily applied to what we’re doing.

Finally, she spoke about how to get into the industry by building up relationships and in turn, this will build up trust and as a result, lead to more jobs coming your way, she also stressed the importance of doing work experience in the relevant area and making the most of this by being likeable, knowing when to be quiet etc. She also said that is much easier to start out by working for a smaller company and then going freelance and that in the area of sound supervising runners are starting jobs

November 26, 2017Simon Nunn No Comments

Project Management Skills

As my first learning objective is centred on improving my project management skills it is vital that i understand the basics of these, however, project management skills are much more than just one individual skill instead is a mixture.

This mixture according to a blog post by the company LiquidPlanner suggests that is a multitude of six:

The first being communication as you have to be able to convey ideas and thoughts to the various teams that are involved in creating this project. According to this blog, the easiest way to improve your communication skills is to do presentations and work in various group projects, I would argue that I have however been doing this already to some extent by doing presentations within the degree programme and I work in various groups both for university projects and outside of this.

The next is leadership as you are seen as the person who is in charge of the project overall and this means that it is key to be able to delegate things to other people as well as understand what you want to achieve in the project.

The third skill that is needed heavily relates to the previous two is team management as this is needed to ensure that the project is successful as you must make sure that the teams that work for you see through their jobs and help to sort out any issues alongside being able to lead these teams to fulfil them, directly correlating to leadership.

The fourth skill is negotiation as you must be able to settle any disputes that arise when undertaking the project and making sure that all the parties that are involved in the project are happy with the final outcome, this heavily relates to being able to effectively communicate with people so that jobs are done and that you are able to talk to one another.

Organisation is the fifth skill needed to be a good project manager as you must be able to organise yourself to stand a chance at being able to organise anyone else who is working with or for you

Finally, risk management is mentioned as you must be able to foresee any potential problems that may occur when the project is being undertaken and plan to avoid them, so for us this could be the risk of us not having enough contributors due to someone dropping out, or no one wanting to be involved and we would need to resolve this by having people on backup that we could ask.

6 Essential Skills for Project Managers

I would say that i have utilised all of these skills in doing this project as there have been numerous occasions where I have needed all of these skills to complete things to allow the completion of the project as a whole, for example finding contributors used a combination of communication, negotiation and organisation to make sure that a date had been set and that this had been told to the contributors and that they knew about everything they were being asked to do.

November 19, 2017Simon Nunn No Comments

Week 8 tutorial

This week we discussed what we had done in the previous week which was that James had finished the script and I had started to contact people with me at the time not having any responses to these. We also talked about how the major issue we had which was that we hadn’t found a second girl to keep our panel gender balanced, however at the end of the day it was agreed that we would be okay if we weren’t able to achieve this. The other thing we discussed was what we needed to achieve and this was simply to refine the script and contact other people.

Outside of the meeting we had also discussed how we were going to do social media and that we would make use of both Facebook and Twitter with these being mockups and that any video content would be placed on Facebook over Twitter.

November 15, 2017Simon Nunn No Comments

Budget

Budget

It is vital that if we were doing this project for real that we create a budget for the series of programmes or for one-off programmes, in our case this will be for the ‘mini-series’ of 3 podcasts that we are creating for BBC Radio 1.

We intend to receive £4500 in income for the ‘mini-series’ as it will be based on 3 episodes each being billed at £1500 to BBC Radio 1 as stated within their commissioning guidelines (BBC,2017). This, unfortunately, will not cover all of our initial startup costs meaning we will not be making profit of this first ‘mini-series’, despite this in the real world we would be producing other content to allow us to bring in a more substantial income and there is the possibility included in the commisioning document of expanding a ‘mini-series’ such as what we are producing into a fully fledged series of 12 podcasts.

In terms of expenditure, this will be the following:

Studio hire- This is charged at £130 per hour with a roundtable based studio set up for us to record the panel, each podcast would require 1-2 hours of recording meaning each podcast would cost £260, and when this is multiplied by three it equates to £780. (Sound company,2017)

Equipment- We will be buying two laptops to allow us to edit, write scripts, research etc, without any sort of laptop we would be unable to do anything in regards to producing content. The cost of two Mac Book pros with decent specifications costs £1,449 per one meaning a net figure of £2,900.

Software- In terms of software, we will be needing Adobe Creative cloud which allows to get a wide variety of software as we will be required to produce short-form videos alongside pictures and gifs for social media channels which can all be done through creative cloud, which will cost us £720 per year. In terms of the digital audio workstation that we use it will be Logic, this is because it is significantly cheaper than others such as Cubase and Pro-Tools due to Logic not being subscription based and relatively cheap at its one-off purchase cost of £199.

Contributor fees- It would be very unlikely that people would do the podcast if they weren’t going to be paid for their time, meaning we will offer a flat rate of fees per person at £150 per person meaning that with an episode of 3 people it would cost £450 meaning a series would cost £1,350. However, the issue with this is that if someone was promoting something then we may not have to pay them as we are allowing them to promote their new book etc on our podcast. This means that we could potentially get a lower figure if we do not have to pay contributors.

Office- We have chosen to be based in central London as this means that we will have access to a huge talent pool that may be willing to be involved in the podcast and that the majority of the BBC Radio networks are based in London means that if we were to win other commissions then the production of these would be easier and we could attend meetings a lot more easily. However, this does not cheap with the office being £350 a month, meaning £4,200 a year.

November 14, 2017Simon Nunn No Comments

Learning Outcome- Confidence

I did some research on how to improve my confidence in approaching people to be involved in the project. The first article I read was from Poynter which suggested 5 ways in which you can improve your confidence and be less shy/embarrassed in how you approach people, despite being based for a journalist there was still a lot of things to consider.

The first thing was that I have a professional responsibility to talk to people and ask people if want to be involved within the project due to it being vital for the success of the project as a whole and if I were in a professional environment it would be vital as the project wouldn’t be completed and we wouldn’t gain an income. The next point was that the job role should be the encouragement to make you speak to people as this should act as the motivation. The next thing I learned from this article was that it is vital to have clear-cut research around the person you are going to ask to be involved alongside having dates and times that you would like the potential contributor to be free on so that they can be involved. The final two things that I took from this article was that it is very important for me to stop worrying about the potential outcome of an email/telephone response and just do it and I can relate to this one with particular effect as i’m guilty of doing this. Finally, the notion that practice makes perfect is referenced as the more time you ring or email people the less stigma you have about talking to people.

https://www.poynter.org/news/5-ways-journalists-can-overcome-shyness-during-interviews

The next article I read was from the website Matador network which gave me the following pointers: The first is that you shouldn’t deliberate asking people and you should just do it as the more you ask people, the easier it becomes to do. The second thing was that you shouldn’t apologise for ringing people or emailing people to ask them as you shouldn’t be ashamed of what you’re doing. The penultimate thing is that you should have courage in asking people to be involved as eventually some people will say less to being involved in the programme idea that you have. Finally it is vital that you know what you want from the person and don’t lie to them about what you want them to do and why you are asking them to be involved.

How to approach strangers for interviews

Ultimately it is vital that i conquer this lack of confidence to both be successful in the project and in the general environment of where I want to work as i will be required to speak to people and ask questions alongside asking them if they would like to talk about themselves and if i can’t do this then i will be unlikely to break into my chosen career let alone keep a job.