Audio Project: Wired 4 Sound Podcast

I took on the role of being a sound editor and interviewer for the project. I know the band we interviewed so I think it could tend to be a bit biased. Luckily this kind of interview doesn't suffer from these matters but had it been another group of interviewees and a different subject I think the interview would be a lot less credible. Using one microphone between the four of us made it difficult to get a really good sound, this is where I should have manipulated the interview further somewhat but the only way would have been to script it. At the beginning I told them the questions I was going to ask which gave them a chance to really think about their answers. This was probably a good way of conducting the interview instead of telling them what to say which would really make the interview bad as an informative piece. I think I should have also rehearsed the interview so that they got used to their answers.

I approached the interview thinking that I would ask the questions but re-record them later which was a terrible idea it left a lot of time spent on re-recording and editing the dialogue in. It was a result of me not being confident enough to be a radio personality. I really think that I should have approached it with a degree of professionalism and I think that's what I really learnt the fact that being professional and just good at the job you have to do is the best way to handle a situation. I think that I should have got more advice on how to handle the microphone because they are aimed at certain directions so the way you hold it can really influence the sound that you get. If there are any chances to interview or present for small pieces of filming or audio I would gladly take it, I think that it's worth challenging myself to get better at something that I don't think i'm that good at. The job as interview has also taught me that I would be better of handling the technical side of broadcasting, I don't think I've got to grips with the soundtrack pro software as well as I could have and that could be improved upon.

I think that the jobs I took on appeared to be easy but going through the process really made it obvious how difficult it could be and little attentions to detail and experience can help you improve at the craft a great deal. This is key to the broadcast industry I think, where having multiple skills is important but really being good at each of those things will be essential to your success in the long run.

Visit To Endemol Studios Bristol, Deal Or No Deal

We got the chance to visit the Endemol studio’s in Bristol to watch deal or no deal being filmed. I’ve never actually watched the show so I did some research and realised that it’s become a bit of a phenomenon, quickly becoming one of the nation’s favourite television shows. I read a few articles on the show done by journalists who had the same experience we were about to have, it sounded really fun, most of it was about the contestants. The contestants all stay in a hotel together, partying and having fun in the evenings then spending their days filming three episodes of deal or no deal. Each episode sees a contestant stepping up and therefore leaving the group by the end of the show and people can spend months as a contestant until they get picked. I was also interested to find out that some people had even left their jobs for this opportunity.

After a short wait we met Annalise who had us wait to join the rest of the audience who had probably just had a talk about their roles as an audience. We joined the end of the audience queue and were ushered onto the set. We got a chance to speak to the audience researchers who were getting the audience to their seats. I learnt that getting to that position was the same as I’ve learnt so far, which is starting as a runner and working your way to researcher, this was also the first time I’d hear about the lack of people working in media in the southwest. We were seated according to height and within a few minutes the warm up guy took the mic and started telling a few jokes, one of them aimed at reuben, I think he told him to smile and made fun of how low he was wearing his beanie hat. We spent some time practicing our reactions, like clapping and cheering, and saying ooooooh when something bad happened. I was glad that there were only two reactions; it made it easier on my brain. The contestants were ready, having their make up done, they were a really good laugh and you could see they all got along really well with each other which made it really enjoyable to watch.



There was about seven cameras set up, the most interesting looking was attached to a cameraman in a kind of suit where he controlled the camera while walking around the set. Before filming of the show began we practiced our reaction shots while the cameramen took some close ups of some of the audience.

The show began as they picked a contestant randomly; it was genuinely done at random by the computer because they had to stop the filming to give the lucky contestant a lapel mic. The show took about an hour and a half to film and it was hugely entertaining. I thought that Noel conducted himself really professionally on and off camera but was still very friendly and joked with the audience, the crew and the contestants.

It became clear that the camera crew were taking directions from the gallery team as they freely moved around the set circling noel and the female contestant as well as the other contestants. There were a few stops for where the adverts would be where the make up team would come back to touch up anyone that needed it. At these times the floor manager and would direct us at our clapping when the show would resume controlling us like a conducter.
After the excitement of watching the show being filmed we were taken on a tour of the facilities at Endemol. There seemed to be a lot of outsourcing going on as both the editing suite, which was just round the corner, and the camera crew were hired from a different company. I think they called the editing suites ‘The Farm’.

Overall it was a great trip but I think it may not have been as informative on roles as our BBC trip was.

Visit to BBC Bristol, Points West

My fellow students and I had the pleasure of visiting BBC Bristol recently for a tour around the site and a chance to sit in the gallery for their regional news programme Points West.
Our first stop was the main office, which was so busy that hopefully no one noticed me walking straight into a waste bin. I assume that all the chaos was because it was nearly time for the news to be broadcast but wouldn’t be surprised if it was always like that. We quickly walked past the journalists’ desks that were preparing their stories for 12 o’clock. Our guide showed us their central server, the hub, which is more or less in the centre of the room. This is where all the stories, graphics and other files are uploaded to.

The next stop was to the desk of Points West’s weatherman Richard Abgwin who explained that the introductory graphic for the weather contains a ball which is graphically altered to show an overview of the weather for that day, so if there a lot of snow or icy weather the ball would be snowy or white. Theoretically you wouldn’t even need to watch the weather just have a look at the ball! The weatherman is surprisingly self-sufficient, as he handles the meteorology graphs that will appear behind him on the show and prepares his own scripts. He explained that another job he has to do is act as a kind of buffer for the shows running time, so if the programme is running over schedule he would have to cut down his segment to fit in the rest of the shows running time, I had no idea the news was that rigid with running times.

We met the man who’s job it is to post up the news stories on the BBC website for the Bristol and Gloucestershire pages and ceefax, he took us through how once he and his co-worker have decided on the text to be posted up then it’s his job to look over it once more, spell check it, edit it and then post it up using the system, typically one page can only post up to 11 news stories at a time so usually the ones that are the oldest will get replaced, generally these stories stay up for as long as 48hrs. He explained that the system is used at Birmingham as well and generally between Bristol and Birmingham there will be someone to cover stories 24hours a day.

We were ushered into the bristol radio room, which had a reception area and two studio’s. A presenter Steve Yablsey was finishing up his show, and got a glimpse of us saying something like “and now it we have what appears to be a bunch of tramps in the studio.” That did make me think that maybe we were a little underdressed for the occasion. He called us into the studio, and for a while none of us moved till Will decided to be there first one in, he asked us what our names were and even said I had a “rock star name.” He asked Will what we were studying and eventually he answered the question, Steve thanked us because he needed to fill in a few extra minutes of the show before going off air. It was looking pretty good we’d been live on the radio and called tramps by a radio presenter, I thought that we were now seriously interacting with the crème de la crème of the entertainment world. . We wenr into a studio which wasn’t in use, where someone explained the ease of which to use the studio kit which boiled down to a few faders and a stop and play button. They showed us what some of the lights meant, apart from the obvious red ‘on-air’ light; one of them was blue and only really goes off if Prince Charles, Prince William (but not Harry) or Tony Blair has died. I don’t know how serious they were about that though. I have to admit it looked great and until then I’d never been too fussed about radio work but I’ve become more interested with this visit, combined with the work I’ve done on the course.

We then met the Graphic Designer who showed us briefly what he had been working on which included a graphic for a sports promo which has about 3-4 different layers of imagery. We didn’t get much time to see the actual process involved in this as Point’s West was beginning to start filming.

The studio for Point’s West is surprisingly small compared to how it appears on television, I realised this was due to clever placement of the cameras. The studio had 3 cameras mounted onto large mobile stands, the floor manager demonstrated the ease of moving the camera which greatly pleased Reuben, who is interested in being a cameraman. Chris Vacher , Points Wests main presenter walked into the room and we were introduced to him, he wasn’t too chatty though and I think it’s probably because he was focusing on the task at hand. Before we left the floor manager said we could come back to play with the cameras, which never happened, Reuben was not pleased about that.

Being in the gallery was probably my favourite part of the visit. We sat behind the gallery team, which consisted of the producer, director, vision mixer and sound engineer. I fear that we may have been on this visit a bit too early because I was totally overwhelmed by watching the news being filmed right in front us, because it was live it felt like anything could go wrong at any minute, however this is obviously not the case as apart from being experienced professionals I realised that to them this was simply their day job. In front of the crew were about 5 widescreen plasma screen TV’s with all displaying smaller boxes which included things like images being used in stories, the auto cue, the 3 camera’s set up in the studio and a camera feed from a field reporter at a Bristol museum. The show ran smoothly with Vacher pre-recording the headlines, and a signer being pre-recorded. The only obvious concern from the director (apart from her game of solitaire) was that the field reporter was conducing an interview using a boom mic, which looked really stupid however the reporter explained it was the only mic available.

I really liked the visit to BBC although I do wish that there was enough time to give us a proper explanation of osme of the roles and I will look forward to gaining that knowledge and experience during work experience next year.

Social Networking

For our presentation on new digital media I chose to do mine on social networking as I enjoy using several different social network sites.

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It's interesting to look at this presentation now, in the last slide I mentioned 'the next big thing' in social networking which is still unclear and at the same time Facebook was clearly the most popular. Less than a month after I gave the presentation I've heard people say that Facebook's days are numbered and I've come across an article from Guardian Media about Facebooks possible successors. One of the sites mentioned in the article, Twitter, introduces SMS text messaging to social networking so I wish I had mentioned it in the presentation.

You can read the article on the future of social networking here.

Licensing Music

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As far as researching tasks went this was the toughest as it was extremely hard to find relevant sites and once I did, I found they were very vague about the process. This project made it clear how difficult and expensive it is to gain licenses to use popular artist's music, an important lesson when it comes to making video projects in the future.

Presentation on Editors

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Audience Research - Children

This is mine and Balve’s presentation on the characteristics of children (under 16) as a target audience.

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This was my first (and only) attempt at using the 20/20 rule for presentations, which probably wasn’t too wise as it makes it seem overrun. I am proud of the inclusion of graphs and pictures in this presentation and learnt a lot about how media affects children. I noticed that children of different ages have different experiences of the world and the media around them, the life of a 5yr old is completely different than that of a 15yr old.

Newsdesk - The end of EMAP

Media company Emap has sold it’s business-to-business division to Guardian Media Group and private equity firm Apax for £1bn, this appears to be the final nail in the Emap coffin after the sale of its magazine and radio divisions to german publishers Bauer for a joint price of £1.14bn.

Earlier in December Emap looked unlikely to sell its business-to-business division, as they believed the offers were too low but GMG and Apax recently returned with the offer of £1bn. The chairman of Emap Alun Cathcart felt sadness seeing the end of 60 years of Emap as a publishing company but considers the investors their top priority. "Our job is to look after shareholder value. We now have an offer that is substantially better than the one we had two weeks ago."

It is believed that GMG and Apax will run the newly acquired division as one company together.

GMG's chief executive, Carolyn McCall, said the deal helped meet the commitments of its owner, the Scott Trust, formed in 1936 to safeguard the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian.

It’s been interesting to see this development over time as I was assigned to research Emap at the beginning of the semester and now the company effectively no longer exists, it seems that this has been set in motion in the absence of Chief Executive Tom Moloney who resigned last May however it is believed that this has happened due to the advertising markets moving from print and radio to the web, a true example of how broadcasting is rapidly changing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/22/emap.emapbusiness?gusrc=rss&feed=media