The last listen

The Christmas holidays are over and its back to University. We managed to book out a radio studio so that we could listen to our final group project and see if there was anything else we could do to improve it. Luckily we noticed that the outro needed to be re-recorded and thanks to our productivity and organisation, this last studio session meant we were able to make the vital changes we needed. Seeing as i had finished my individual pieces over the festive holidays, i was now finished with my radio production. Looking back on my work i am very chuffed with what i had accomplished. The group project is my favourite piece of work as i really enjoyed the dynamics of th porgramme. I am a bit gutted that i was unbale to get interviews for a couple of my individual pieces but i am still very happy with the content.

Finalising the project

Our last session in the radio studios before the Christmas holidays was upon us, with no snow disrupting the availability of the University and with our whole group in attendance, it was time to finish the project. Everyone had their individual pieces of radio to include into the programme and we also had most of the links so we had very high hopes for our last session.

These high hopes turned into a reality as once we put it all together in Adobe Audition, we pretty much had our final product. We had to re-record one link and do a bit of fine editing but once this was done we were very happy that we had almost finished. I say almost because although we had the programme finished there is no harm in going over it again and fine editing even further and seeing if we were missing anything. To do this Giles and myself have decided to return to Southampton a day or two early to try and use the radio studios whilst everyone else is still recovering from their new years eves. I just hope that not everyone else has the same idea as us.

Week 10 - Snow week

So its week 10, this session and next Fridays session are our last 2 to finish our production. What does England do? It bites us in the arse with snow. Although the radio studios were open, only me and Giles turned up because of the festive weather issues. Without our group to hand there was not much we could do as a group, so we used the time to finish our individual pieces.

We will have to speak to our group and see if we can book the studios out before Friday so that we can have a couple of sessions to piece together what we have and finalise the group project.

Week 9

Time is running out so we decided to get our act together and start recording some links for our final group project. Giles decided on our jobs with myself being a co-host and reporter. Recording the links was a lot of fun as we decided to do a light hearted programme due to it being an early morning show. For this reason we didn't want mundane, boring voices. We wanted excited, interesting voices to wake up the early morning listeners who might be commuting to work or university.

To achieve this angle, in all of our links we added in a tiny bit of banter between myself and the other co-host Giles. This worked really well as these links really helped the project flow and, like i said earlier, really gave it a interesting tone by not having a standard match report, then bulletin, then match report structure. Just by adding in these 10 seconds or so of banter and opinionated conversation it really helped to keep it interesting.

Next week we have planned to include all of our reports and fit them into our structure and edit it all in to get an idea of what our final project will sound like. Once we have this we can decide what needs to be improved.

Week 8

Unfortunately i was unable to attend this weeks lecture as i was up north in the great city of Manchester doing some paid work. I was gutted to have missed valuable production time but the bills had to come first. Whilst i was away i did spend time thinking about my individual six pieces and even had a look around Old Trafford to get some inspiration.

Although i was unable to attend and record some pieces i did get a final idea of what each piece was going to include.

Week 7

This week we were given the full 3 hours to work on our projects in the radio studios. Luckily our group was the only full group there so we went straight down to the studios and started recording some of our individual pieces with the intent to choose some of them for our final project. Once this was done we discussed different roles to be assigned for the project. Although no roles were 100% decided we did get an idea of who wants to do what but its up to the editor (Giles) to decide.

In this session we also decided to see who's voice was to be used for the introduction. This was a heap of fun with all of us trying to do the X factor "Its time...to face...the music" voice. Once we all recorded our voices, Giles took them home on a USB stick and was going to put them over our possible musical introductions and see which voice was best suited.

Week 6

Week 6....getting near the end now. This week was just a reflective session. We started off by listening to our practice bulletins using Spot On. I was quite pleased with mine apart from the levels. I was obviously very stupid and unaware that my levels were off the chart. That aside i was told that the content of the bulletin itself was very good but the levels of the basketball noises in the background could have been louder to compliment the bulletin. There were some very impressive bulletins from the rest of the group, my favourite being Giles' who managed to mix some Tottenham vs Inter commentary into a breaks tune which sounded as if it was supposed to be there originally, due to Giles' editing.