November 2017 – Page 3 – Have You Heard The News- The Year In Review

November 7, 2017Simon Nunn No Comments

Lol Hammond

Lol Hammond is a music supervisor for Vertigo films and a composer for films. In terms of his music supervisor credits, he has worked on films such as Bronson, Its all gone Pete Tong and Monsters.

First of all, he discussed the role of the music supervisor and explained that he was responsible for finding composer(s) for films and negotiating with them alongside sourcing tracks for particular scenes and overseeing the sound design. He also stressed that there is a lot of negotiation between labels, artists and publishers to get to license a track and that to be good at being a music supervisor you need to have good negotiation skills and basic social skills. He also explained the process of how he licenses a track by utilising a mixture of asking people and pitching to people and stressed that going directly to an artist can lead to a piece of music being much cheaper or actually agreeing for it to be used. In terms of industry advice, he said that if you wanted to do anything in film both composition or music supervisor wise you should practice on short films as these are very easily watched by industry professionals, related to this is that you should know your stuff in regards to music and not box yourself into just one grenre of music that you just like as it would impact the potential jobs you may get in the future.

November 4, 2017Simon Nunn No Comments

Week 6 tutorial with Zara

This week started quite well in regards to us having made significant contact with potential contributors with James having put an advert out on Mandy actors about potential contributors. We did receive quite a few responses however and after we had shifted through we decided to approach two people from this. One called Charlie was experienced in doing a comedy programme called news revue which is a live comedy programme with sketches etc. The other potential contributor was Will who is a more local standup comedian/actor. James contacted both and arranged phone conversations with them. Unfortunately, i wasn’t able to be at the one that he had with Charlie but judging from what he said she was interested and also gave us pointers on how we should conduct ourselves generally as we hadn’t set a date for recording etc. I was however able to come and speak to Will, who over the phone seemed like he had the right interests and knew what he was talking about in terms of satirical comedy etc. The one problem that did become apparent was that we weren’t going to be able to book both Charlie and Will at the same time meaning one of them would have to be cut, and it was decided that out of preference we would have Charlie due to her experience.

I had also been in regular contact with Alex Rhodes from BBC Lincolnshire and he wanted clarification over what the project was and how we intended to do it, with who was also on the panel. However after trying to book Alex and dealing with requests one problem that has become apparent is that he may be working the day that we wanted to record which me and James had both set after Charlie’s advice and telling us that we need to do so. This ultimately leads us to be in an awkward situation with only a panel of three people and if Alex can’t do it we will need to find another journalistic type of person who would be willing to be involved.

We also had our weekly tutorial with Zara this week who is now our regular tutor after Dylan going off ill, meaning that a lot of ideas were discussed. The first thing that was discussed was our learning objectives, Zara said that we were not being specific enough with them and needed to go into more depth around the likes of target audience etc and state why we’re doing the project i.e Portfolio piece etc. The other thing was discussed was why we’re putting it on Radio 4 and whether our cast at the time really suited the station or whether they suited radio 1 to a higher degree, the other advantage of doing this for Radio 1 was that it would mean our duration would be reduced down to 30 minutes instead of having to fill a whole hour, related to this was the problem of James fitting a radio 4 presenter style as this was very unlikely. Finally, we discussed who we should be talking to as Zara suggested that we spoke to a list of people from both Radio 4 commissioning and presenting to give us advice from our script to helping us with what they are looking for in a comedy piece.

November 2, 2017Simon Nunn No Comments

Luke Pickering

This week’s guest lecturer was Luke Pickering of the Church Studios in London, Luke also studied Audio production at Lincoln.

Despite Luke being from a different field of audio considering I want to go into radio it was still a valuable talk. What I particularly drew upon was the fact that Luke described the creative industries as a service industry meaning that the work you do is to serve a client not to serve yourself, this means that money always comes first in any project, and this is relevant in any field of the audio industry. Luke also gave some interesting pointers on how to get work experience and what you should do once you get it, with me particularly taking note of him saying that you have to engineer your own luck and that then it is up to you try and make things happen rather than you relying on someone else to do it for you, he also stressed the importance of knowing when is and isn’t the right moment to talk to someone and how to make yourself ‘invisible’. The other thing he talked about was what industry professionals are looking for from someone, which he stated was the following: switched on, strong initiative, not annoying and driven, this was really interesting to hear about as he said it was obvious if someone comes into the studio who hasn’t got these qualities they are simply not invited back. The final thing i took was that you shouldn’t big yourself up on applications as again people can tell if you’re lying about something and are less likely to pick you over someone who is honest.