Produce an extract from a documentary series, or current affairs programme to include studio presentation, interview and either theme tune or jingle.

Steven Truong

Brief and Research

The task was to produce an extract from a documentary series, or current affairs
programme to include studio presentation, interview and either theme tune or jingle. The text would last around five minutes and must sound professional. To do this I needed to develop skills in recording and editing. For this project to be completed successfully I needed to know about how radio documentaries and current affairs programs are made.

The college has its own radio studio that is to a high standard and quite professional equipment. The college uses mini disks to record and transfer data. The mini disk recorders are fairly professional and I found that they were easy to transport around for interviews. I felt that using the equipment in the radio station wasn’t too difficult because I use to be a radio DJ for my previous schools.

The radio stations that I listened to were BBC Radio 1, 2, 3, 4, Newcastle, Metro and Galaxy. The public radio stations are all ran by BBC the others are commercial. Commercial radio stations have a convention of being entirely music based. This is because they need to attract audiences of large audiences for advertisers. In recent BBC surveys they have found that the audience over 35 tend to listen to a high ratio of speech to music radio. These two commercial stations have an audience that are biased to a younger audience although Galaxy is more acute to this. The BBC is designed to cater for the general public, as it is the general public who directly pay for this service.

Radio 4 is a speech based station, where music is rarely played and most of the productions are speech based to cater for its older audience of 35 to over 45. Radio 4 generally airs intelligent speech based programs that are for everyone. For example, they have a woman’s hour that is targeted at women because its features consist of netball, mothering, cooking e.t.c.

Radio Newcastle, as with all BBC local stations, majors on providing news and information for people in its transmission area, together with compatible entertainment. Radio Newcastle, when compared to other stations in its local transmission area, offer the widest variety of programs to the area. For example, Radio Newcastle has time slots available especially for football, like when a Sunderland and Newcastle match is on the station is divided into two stations where on FM they would air the Newcastle commentary and on MW they would air the Sunderland match. Whilst the other stations that are purely music and/or arts based consist of BBC Radio 1 and 2 are similar to the commercial stations and are purely music based; with Radio 1 targeting a younger audience similar to Galaxy and Radio 2 attracting an older audience. This signifies that my program will either be aired on BBC Radio 4 or Newcastle, as these are speech based.

The way the show is significant because the presenter (and the topic) relate to the audience. I found that the presenters on the speech-based stations were quite formal and spoke clearly in RP. This is so the listeners do not have any complications in listening to the program. As radio is seen to be a tertiary medium, comprehensible speech is quite important to keep the listeners attention. Current affairs programs are generally on at peak times such as drive hours. Documentaries are fact based. They feature information and central facts on the topic. The key factor of documentaries are ...

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Planning the Production

The production insisted that the groups should consist a maximum of three. I chose to work with Michael Short because he has similar concepts to me and I have found that he is easy to work with and well motivated. The next stage was to discuss and choose a topic for the extraction to be based around. There were many topics discussed but the two main subjects were ‘students and local rivalry’ and ‘teenage pregnancy’. We chose these because we could familiarise with these topics giving us a better view of what to discuss and present to the audience. The lecturer persisted that we should not choose teenage pregnancy because the other groups of people that had attempted this topic previously found it difficult to make the topic interesting to a large audience. He believed that the topic had no real audience because teenage mothers don’t tend to listen to speech radio and the only interest would be from a minority of parents. The topic could have been aired on woman’s hour on Radio 4 but teenage pregnancy in a small area would not interest an audience on a national level. Students and local rivalry was a good choice because we live in a student-saturated city. Locals sometimes feel lower classed than student because they do not have ‘student only nights’ at pubs or clubs, as Durham nightlife generally cater for students. This has lead to some forms of conflicts involving violence between the two.

After researching into the topic through old newspaper articles I found that conflicts between the two happened rarely and only happened with a minority of people on both sides. We decided to alter the subject slightly to ‘how students affect Durham economy’. We found this theme to be feasible because Durham has a reputation from its University. Without the University where would Durham be? This is the question I aim to answer. The program will feature as a documentary extract about the effects of Universities are having on the North East because many areas are affected by students such as Jesmond, North Gate and Durham itself. The lecturer said that this is a feasible idea because students moving into his area had affected him himself and believes that they are significant to not only the economy but also the community.

The next stage was to organise interviews with possible interviewees that would benefit my program. Living in Durham and knowing residents who have been living here for quite awhile I found that organising interviews was not that difficult. We discussed that Michael would be dealing with the narrative and myself would conduct the interviews. This was because I knew the possible interviewees better and we thought I would be more comfortable with them. Michael also has a clearer voice making him more understandable and suitable as a presenter.

Every radio documentary is scripted, this is because the program will be structured and organised instead of sounding spontaneous. This means we will have to prepare the links, cues and introduction for the program before doing any actual recording in the studio, this is to not waste studio time for other students. The interviews that I will conduct will mainly be soft interviews because these are generally easier to do and a hard, formal interview will be too difficult for me to produce at this stage.

Structure

As I have already identified my interviewees all I had to do was to prepare them by organising a time for the interview to take place and the questions that would be asked to them. After organising times for the interviews to take place and booking all the equipment needed I began to write the questions. To prepare for the interviews I asked a friend to ask the questions to me so I knew what kind of position the interviewee was in. This was to see if the interviewee would feel uncomfortable or not and to signify the points I wanted to get through in the interview. The interviewees that I chose all had different opinions on students living in Durham. I had three interviews in total, one biased towards students, one against them and another that was unbiased. This was so the program wasn't biased towards a certain opinion, giving the listener a 'two sided' program.

To record the interviews I used the portable mini-disk recorders. The lecturer had previously shown us who to use them and what kind of microphones would be suitable for the interview. The main problem with the mini-disk recorders was that the battery would hardly ever be fully charged because people would forget to charge them after they had used them. I overcame this problem by asking the technician to put them on charge instead of relying on the students.

After recording all the interviews we had to record the links and cues in the program. As the presenter, Michael had to convey facts and information to the listeners about the show. He first had to introduce the listeners to the show by giving them a brief background of the topic and then initiates my recordings (the interviews and vox pop).

We had to do all the editing in the radio suite. Since there is only one radio suite in the college the students had to share the room using a rotary system where each group would have 45 minutes using the equipment. To edit the program I used Creative WaveLab Pro. We initially transferred all our recordings from mini disk onto the computer. Many of the recordings had unnecessary gaps in that needed to be edited out. These gaps consisted of pauses, repetition of context that were irrelevant and dead air. All programs on radio or in any medium needs to flow and follow the conventional flow of radio programs. The order of the program was:

Jingle/Theme tune

Introduction

Recordings/cues/links

Conclusion

Jingle/Theme tune

This flow was done in the montage and we allowed small gaps between the recordings for the interview to grasp that a change from presenter to interview was coming. After editing all these together we produced a jingle. The jingle had to be suitable for the station it was going to be aired on (Radio Newcastle). We chose to use the Coldplay track clocks because Coldplay tracks are registered for use on BBC.

What we found was that all the recordings had different sound levels. To make the program sound levels all equal we primarily changed the gains of some of the recordings and then normalised the levels.

Evaluation

After completing the program I felt that all the questions that were brought up in the whole program would fit in well with the rise in University prices and how this would affect cities with many students in. The program had an unbiased view, which I thought was good as documentaries are suppose to be unbiased and it allows the listener to form his/her own opinion on the subject. The interviews all went quite well the only thing I would have changed was the sound level. The sounds were different because the interviewees spoke differently to each other. The opinions I received from the interviewees were relevant to the topic and I believe they all had good background knowledge on the topic. I would have preferred the program if I could have had a better insight to the subject from a council member who knew about the economy of Durham well and what they had planned if students stopped going to University because they couldn’t afford it. I feel that the jingle is appropriate not only to BBC but to the station also. It contains all the relevant information needed and is a good device for advertising.

The editing process of the program went well. Only one interview had slight distortion in because I had the sound levels to low and we had to change the gain so high that it amplified the little sounds in the background. The order that the program went was done well and in chronological order as we began with Durham University’s birth to the present day. I believe that Michael did well in giving facts to the audience. He spoke to them as people and not listeners; I believe that this is good because it sounds like a conversation rather than speaking to the masses.

After I showed the lecturer my final piece, she suggested that we should change the order slightly and re-phrase some of the questions because it was a little long. We returned to the studio and edited the questions again and re-phrased the links. I believe that the final piece now is slightly shorter but this is better as the program doesn’t drag. The final piece has a slight accent to the speech. This is acceptable though as it is being aired on a local station. The accent would allow the users to identify with the program. The program contains fact and is informative as a documentary should be.