Evaluation Podcast Script

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
• Our radio station includes all the codes of conventions. It includes a jingle which is a loud guitar sound, then a presenters voice introducing a section and after a sound effect of smashed glass. This is then used again on a different section, so we used it more than once to gain the audience’s attention throughout just in case they lose concentration and also to make it reoccurring throughout.
• The presenters voice was male, this linked to our research as people who took our questionnaire said that it didn’t matter to them what gender the presenter was. In our questionnaire we didn’t ask about accents so we were unable to know, so we just used a plain English accent but we made the voice seem happy and also as if it was interesting to the presenter as well as the listener.
• Repetition was used throughout the piece, the jingle was repeated and also the background music during news stories was the same, we thought this was good as it makes it all link together, if we were to change the background music constantly and the listener loses concentration at any point they could find themselves confused and they wouldn’t know what section they are at.
• The focus of the voice and language was to make the presenters happy, exciting and to make the news stories seem interesting. This was proven to work well in the final piece as the stories seemed interesting from the presenters voices, the emphasis on different parts and the explanations worked rather well.
• The sound bites used as well as phone-ins were mainly vox-pops, we used these for the audience to gain a deeper understanding for the stories and so people get an opinion from the public so they can relate to the stories.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?
• From our research, we found different ways to relate to the social groups of listeners, whether it was age or people with different tastes of genres.
• We chose a different range of genres for our radio station to be based upon from relating back to our questionnaire on the question asking for peoples preferred genres. This question helped us see what different people liked in their radio station, music-wise and also it could help us choose a specific name.
• We came up with ‘Radio Fresh’ this links with multiple genres of music, and it also refers to different things. The word ‘fresh’ basically means new and different, so we put it in our name to say it’s a different radio station as its fun and also it shows new things such as the latest news and songs. Because it refers to multiple things it leaves the listeners mind open to more than one understanding of it. I think the name is more urban and indie as well, which means that it refers to genres like Pop, Dubstep, Indie, R&B etc.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
• Our media product was a Radio Station, so the best way to distribute our product to an audience would be over the Radio or over the internet.
• The radio is a widely used institution, everyone has a radio in their car, in some shops the radio is playing, people play it at work places which means that the radio is constantly around us daily. This means one of the best ways to get it out to our audience would be to choose a desired frequency that allows people to tune in.
• The internet is another place where radio stations occur, whether it is online streaming or podcasts that people can download 24/7 this would be another good way to distribute our product as people would have immediate access to it and also easy access.
• The software ‘iBand’ is a program used to create songs and podcasts supplying different sound effects and jingles, this is what we used and it was easy and a very good software.

Who would be the audience for your media product?
• Radio Fresh was a radio station aimed at an audience ranging between the ages of 15-30 both genders. This was a wide range to concentrate on, we had to decide on specific genres and the way we spoke to listeners so we didn’t sound like we are too formal for the younger people and too informal for the older generation, so we had to relate to everyone as a whole by the formality of the presenters during news broadcasts as we did not want to bore anyone and let them lose concentration.
• The radio stations desired genres were R&B, Hip-Hop, Indie and Dubstep, this was because our questionnaire allowed us to see what people between the ages of 15-30 wanted, so we used these genres as it is what the audience wanted.

How did you attract/address your audience?
• The jingle at the beginning is very loud and in your face, this attracted the younger generation as they like loud things as its exciting for them, then after the jingle we made the news broadcasting more subtle and calmer, for the older generation, but, we still made it exciting for younger people by splitting it all up and adding sound effects where necessary.

Looking back at your preliminary task, who do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
• Looking back at the preliminary task, I feel that I've learnt more about the features of ‘iBand’ the recording software used to create the two products.
• The preliminary task was recorded all onto of each other meaning that we didn’t mute backing music and effects during the speech recording, this made it sound like it was a faint echo at times and the quality of the sound just wasn’t very good.
• Also towards the end of the preliminary task we discovered different effects we could use on upcoming tasks such as different effects on the speech and also different sound effects with different volumes, this came in handy for our final product as we were able to come up with different ideas and improve what we already had.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
• For the radio recording we used Apple iMacs. On this iMacs there was a software called iBand, this is a software which allows you to record songs or in the case a radio station and supply different effects and jingles. This software is easy to use and also worked very well in constructing our product.
• After recording the product it was needed to be put into a video format for it to be able to be uploaded to ‘blogger’ and ‘YouTube’ the software for this was called iMovie, this was also an easy piece of software that changed it from a MP3 format to an MPEG4 or AVI format.