Radio Reflective Essay PDF

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Reflective Essay on a Radio Production Module ...

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Radio Production Self Reflective Analysis:

For the live 20-minute magazine show assessment, my group decided to be creative and choose something different and ambitious. We decided on creating a Fairytale children's magazine show to be broadcast on CBeebies Radio as it hadn’t really been done before, and we wanted to steer clear of the common types of shows that students have created in the past. I was the most confident member in the group to take on the editing for all Jingles, Indents, Beds and any pre-recorded material, I also feel like I helped most with the producing role for the show, giving out roles to everyone in the group and setting individual targets to accomplish by the end of that week and additionally following up with people who weren’t able to attend meetings. I also created the artwork to inspire the group with a vision of what our production would look like, which helped when creating the path our characters would take throughout the show. When creating the soundscapes and sound effects to be used as the beds for each scene during the show, I tried to make them as interesting for a child as much as possible, using exciting sounds was key to making the show a success as they would keep the audience interested and attentive, I started by layering loads of sounds together to create an in-depth sound scape that would take the audience on a journey. I created over 40 sounds for the cart wall to create an immersive feeling, my ultimate goal was to make it sound as magical and realistic as possible so the children would really feel like they visited the kingdom of Bataria. I wrote and composed the intro ‘Welcome to Bataria’ and the prerecorded ‘Magic E Song’ during the show which was a new experience for me as I have never written lyrics or created music by scratch. I used garage band to make the backing track and Annmarie was able to record children singing and put it all together. I also made sure I used royalty free sounds so that the group can broadcast them on social media’s. Overall I felt very proud over what I had accomplished during this project and I felt like I had succeeded in making good quality sounds. On the day of the mock show, we still didn’t have all our pre-recorded sections so we had to improvise with people speaking in, this gave us a good idea on what work still needed to be completed, from recording interviews to editing the script. It was also a bit of a wakeup call for myself and most of the group to realise that we still had a lot of work to do at that point. So overall the mock show was a much needed learning curve as it started most of the group into cracking down on what still needed to be completed. We booked more practices in the studio during the week to do a table read through and let the team on the desk practice along with the script.

Communication was our group’s main downfall, over the weeks nearing the live show, all the table run throughs and practice in the studios were always falling short in the groups attendance, Molly, Chris and myself were the only team members who attended every meeting. This caused the mock show and the live assessment to be under rehearsed, with the presenters and myself stumbling on the script. The way we could improve this for future projects is to be more organised when starting the project, arranging more meetings during the week so that everyone could have at least attended one, and to even the work load, some members did too much work for the assignment whereas some didn’t do much at all. The live assessment went as well as it could have done, with the script being under rehearsed there was some parts during the show where the presenters would pause to read the script, this showed the slight lack or organisation within the group and affected our end result. It also meant that on the day, the presenters were reading through the script too fast as they didn’t realise where the musical intervals were at the beginning of the beds, this resulted in them talking over the slight musical introduction which sounded unprofessional, it also resulted in the script ending 5 minutes earlier than expected. With no help from the producer in the studio to mention the spare time we had left, myself and Annmarie had to improvise on the spot. I quickly came up with the idea to ask Annmarie’s character what they had been up too during the show and reflecting on who they had met. Although it was a little shaky as we were desperately trying to think of things to say, it successfully meant we didn’t end the show too early. Overall everyone in the group made mistakes during this project. I personally felt that I could have done a much better job on my singular role if I hadn’t of had to take care of everyone else’s jobs by taking them through each task they had to complete. I felt like I had taken over the role of producer, by making sure the group were turning up to practices and sending them notes and individual jobs to do, when some of them really should have known without my input. Next time, I now know that too much input is a bad thing, as it affected how much effort I had put into creating the sounds. I will take this experience and make sure I focus solely on my own job in the future. On the other hand, I do believe the end result showed our enthusiasm and ambition to conquer such a challenging type of magazine show, and we now know what areas to improve on in future endeavors....