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.