Week 3: Dean Humphreys

The lecture today was from Dean Humphreys,

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/dean-humphreys-41a15419/?ppe=1

Dean is a sound supervisor who has specialised in Film and TV sound.   Despite not being from the area of what my project is on his talk still had very useful points that could be taken from the lecture.  Dean spoke in depth about the fundamentals of what makes you a good employee for a business and stand out from the rest of the people who want to try and get into the industry alongside general traits.

 

 

The first point that he made is that you must be a team player and be able to work with everyone and help people out despite not potentially seeing eye to eye with them and then relate this to being resilient and being able to take the strain of working to someone who may disagree with you.

 

Secondly, he stressed the importance of being able to reflect on creative ideas and understand the fact that you will have to drop ideas due to you not being in charge of the overall project.  He also related this to the fact that it is key to be able to refresh your workflow and constantly be able to critique yourself as otherwise you are in the wrong industry.

 

Finally he stressed what needs to be done to be successful in getting a job in the industry, with particular importance to timekeeping and arriving early for things rather than turning up bang on time.  Alongside this, he stated the importance of being determined to get into the industry and not giving up despite not having replies to emails and on the topic of emails, he said they should be spell checked and show a genuine passion, rather than being generic and boring.

About

This project is my first of two audio projects to complete the final year of my Audio Production degree. The programme is a 30 minute-ish podcast that will be based on satirical discussion of politics up to June of 2o17.  The title of the podcast is Have You Heard the News- The Year In Review and it would be a series of 3 podcasts covering the year, with this episode being the pilot. It would be aimed at Radio 1’s audience as this is where the podcast would sit and would be broadcast. The reason for this was that radio 1 recently launched a new commissioning brief which is for raw and unmediated opinion based podcasts and we are launching a pilot episode this. Furthermore, we would accompany this by a modest social media presence to demonstrate the potential of a multimedia presence for Have I Heard You the News- The Year In Review.

Second Production Meeting

Today we met with Dylan for our first of many tutorials about how we’re going to create our project. The first significant thing that was discussed was the feasibility of doing our project to the extent that we had initially planned (four thirty minute programmes based around that week’s news), after some discussion though it was established that it would be more achievable to do something based on the years news rather than a bi-weekly programme. This alleviated the potential problem of not having any content for a week and allows us much more time to create the project. The discussion then moved onto the topic of presenters and the actual format of the programme, where it was decided that we would need to approach comedians to help the programme alongside James who would fulfil the role as the ‘anchor’. In regards to the format of the programme, it was decided that we should try and do a piece based on each month with the biggest news to be incorporated in, for example, the General Election and Donald Trump vs Kim Jong Un.  One of the key areas that was discussed was the legality of using other peoples content which is vital to our project, Dylan explained the premise of Fair usage (LINK HERE) and the fact that Siren FM have an agreement with Sky News to use their content, thus meaning that our programme will now most likely be broadcast on Siren FM. Finally, we talked about what areas we should research and this lead us to five key areas: Competition, Audience, Legality/Ethics, Content and Genre.

 

 

First Production Meeting

Today we had our first proper meeting as to how we want to go about creating our project.  Within this meeting, we discussed how we intend to go about the project and it was decided that we would ideally do a bi-weekly programme with myself and James presenting the programme, and with each being roughly 30 minutes in length. Within this 30 minutes, we would talk about the big events of that week in terms of the news and alongside this having running features such as ‘Headline of the Week’ and ‘The Tory leadership’ etc, these segments will obviously need fleshing out significantly into full-on features. Alongside this, we also decided upon the programmes name being ‘Have You Heard The News’.