Category: Production Process

Editing the podcast was probably the most difficult part of producing8 Have You Heard the News- The Year In Review, this was mostly due to the sheer volume of audio that we had recorded and cut around two hours of audio down into 30 minutes was challenging. Our first method was to remove the parts that we didn’t want to include such as the blunders, irrelevant conversation or parts that we deemed to be slander or defamatory towards people.

Once we had done this we still had roughly 45 minutes of audio and at this point, we had to be much more aggressive in cutting the audio down to the 35 minutes we have got to now. This meant that we cut bits that we described as the worst of the best bits meaning that we were able to cut roughly 10 minutes with a discussion about Donald Trump is one of the causes. Once we had finally got down to 35 minutes we didn’t want to cut anymore audio due to us believing that if we had of done the programme would have lost the best bits, in hindsight we probably should have tried to get it down, but most podcasts don’t have an exact time period they should run to. This was also the time where we decided which parts of music we would use and we decided upon top 40 music that had a karaoke version to go to under the conversation and make the podcast feel like it was snappier and more in the radio 1 style.

The editing stage also included the mixing of the podcast which we effectively split in two to make it even, with me taking the first 17 minutes and James taking the last 17 minutes. This meant that there were minor differences in style and sound when we came to the end and mixed it together to make it concise there were some minor stylistic problems, but we did work through them and ultimately produced the piece.

I believe that this project is a strong portfolio piece and I would include it in my demo.  Numerous different websites state the importance of having a good a demo which is essential for getting into radio and i intend to put this piece into my demo when I apply for jobs. It is also very different from previous items that I have in my demo currently meaning it will be stronger and help me to get a job.

In terms of what people look for in a demo, the website the pips suggest that the best part of the programmes you have worked on previously should be included so from this project I would probably utilise items that are in the trails for social media as they are the funniest bits.  The pips also warn against humour as this is quite polarising however I believe that our humour isn’t very polarising and is generally understandable. They also suggest that you shouldn’t over produce a demo and that there shouldn’t be a lot of sound effects and jingles in a demo, again we didn’t use many of these, however, the one area that may be off slight issue is that we did include music beds underneath and I may have to come back and remove these for the demo.

http://www.thepips.co.uk/hints-tips/demo-tips/

The student radio association also has tips on what is good for a demo with one of the most important beings that you should target your demo for different stations, while this is not entirely relevant for this objective there is a similarity as it would be advisable to have more of this project if I was applying for a podcast related job etc.  Again the next point is not entirely relevant but still relates as they suggest that you should be strong-willed and determined to make it into the industry and take criticism on the chin which is off great importance for making it into the radio industry as a whole.

10 Top industry tips on the perfect radio demo

I also believe that it is a strong piece as we have hit all of the commisioning guidelines that were set out in the original commissioning document and as a result, the project should be good to listen too as if we have achieved them this would transfer to the project being strong in a portfolio, especially at Radio 1 due to them being the ones who oversee the guidelines.

The recording process started well as we went to the studio 4 hours before we needed to to go through clips and check they were in the right hour, it also allowed us to check over basic things such as whether there was a headphone feed etc. After we had done everything we then tried to get a signal into the Mac so that we could record the programme, however this proved near impossible and despite our best efforts we couldn’t get the desk to work, meaning that we had wasted two hours of our contributor’s time already without anything even being done. After us getting hold of a fellow audio production student we ended up moving to the multitrack studio instead as we had someone with us who knew how to use it.

Once we were in here and had fixed the initial problems with the sample rate we were fine with the rest of the recording process, with clips being played out via the RadioLogik DJ software. The only issues we did have was that there was a lot of spill between microphones due to the nature of it being a panel show where people sit next to each other, the other issue was level as at times people did not all talk together then at others everyone would start talking meaning that I had to ride the faders which did cause problems as at times I was very slow to react. In hindsight, I also should have told people how to sit with microphones in front of them as Jack and Grace had never been in that type of environment before meaning that there was a lot of popping due to us not telling them how to reduce this.

Overall though the recording was successful it did take longer than we had expected due to us having to move studios and give up on fixing the studio we had intended to use.

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.

This week with Zara we discussed what we had been doing in the previous week and told her what we had decided, the most noticeable one of these was that we had changed our project idea again due to the idea being consistently redeveloped, this time we were set upon creating the project for the radio 1 podcast commisioning opportunity that had just become available. We also discussed whether our learning objectives had been impacted heavily by us changing our target audience and in reality, they had not. Once this had been discussed Zara told us that we should be actively contacting people in both the script side of the project and those on the side of commisioning to allow us to gain  first-hand research and at the same time develop our industry links which is important for my learning outcome about my portfolio piece as if I can get connections that would listen to it already this would be beneficial. Zara also set us some objectives to get done for the end of the next week, as we had to have contacted people and tried to find the final contributor for the project who was a female to make sure that we have a gender-balanced panel, rather than it being dominated by males which should be avoided at all costs.