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.

Week 5 - Spot on

This week were very lucky enough for Will to give us an extra hour lie in which I'm sure everyone, myself included, was very gracious for. Upon arrival Will outlined that the lesson would focus on learning about a program called Spot On which is a new program for myself and i think new to everyone else in the group as well.

After being shown the program i was very excited to use it. Having a script ready to practice using the software, we took it in turns to record our scripts using Spot On. I was very impressed with the sort of things you could achieve using this software and we were already experimenting with musical introductions and beds to underlay our broadcasts. If this wasn't impressive enough, we were then showed by Will that you could take a bed from Spot On, transfer it to Adobe Audition, edit it and then transfer it back to be ready to use.

Learning to use this program i can already tell that it is going to be a great help to our project and to my radio skills in general and i am thoroughly looking forward to playing around on it and seeing what else this software can bring to my broadcasting skills.

Week 4

This week i was unable to make the lecture due to illness. From what i was told, our radio practice project was nowhere near up to scratch. There are many reasons for this, one of which was my own fault. Not knowing we were going to do a practice project, i had to go to work at 12 (when the lecture would normally finish) so my part in the project was rushed. it has also been a while since any of our group had done radio work so this could be another factor to producing (quote from Giles) absolute rubbish.

To combat my absence and the radio practice project i decided to practice my editing skills on Adobe Audition, using irrelevant clips and cutting them down etc to practice. I also did some research into upcoming uni sport fixtures to build up my radio pieces.

Week 3

Week 3 and its time for some practice. We were given the task of creating a 7-8min radio package in the time we had on Friday. Our groups first priority was to get down to the radio studio's and start allocating jobs. I was given/volunteered to be the presenter as i enjoy being the person who links everybody's reports together.

Finding the content was not hard at all, with the Commonwealth games having just coming to a close, Liverpool still going through a takeover fiasco and England's poor performance against Montenegro just days before. We recorded all of these pieces and all of my links and thought that we were sorted. After editing it all together however, we realised that we were 2Min's short.

We decided that rather than doing another match report or bulletin, we would have a 3 way conversation on the Liverpool matter. Although this started out as just a way to fill time, i was actually very pleased with it. Without that we would have had 8Min's of just match reports and bulletins but the 3 way banter mixed our project up and gave it some variety.

Week two

Another week on and the initial shock of the work load and career prospects are gone. Now is the time to be pro-active. After discussing the various jobs involved in radio, i joined up with my group (Giles, Lewis and Fudgy) to discuss what we wanted our radio project to be and what we wanted to achieve with it.

We decided that the best thing to do was to get our own individual 6 pieces of work before going into too much detail of job allocations and project format/layout. Therefore, we scanned the BUCS website for upcoming fixtures that we could be interested in using for our project. We discovered that the Team Solent Basketball team were playing Hackney the very next day and decided to go along to that. Unfortunately Fudgy was unavailable so Lewis, Giles and myself went to the St Mary's Community Centre to watch our first live game of Basketball.

The experience was highly enjoyable and productive. We managed to get a match report and an interview with the victorious Team Solent captain. All of this whilst watching a very tense and exciting game of Basketball, what a shame!