Lend me your ears is a University ran radio show produced by 2nd year media production students.
Previous shows I have been involved in?
Wednesday 6th November 2013 – Community radio within Lincolnshire
Wednesday 22th January 2014 – Writing radio drama
How did the 6th November going?
For this particular show I am the BA. This is someone who runs and controls the radio desk. This past week I have learnt how to run the desk and feel a lot more comfortable with it all. I also took on the role of editing all the audio so it was exactly what we wanted to go live on air. Although it was time consuming I feel the end result is decent.
What have I learnt so far?
– How to conduct myself when talking to the public (Voxpops)
– How to operate the marantz
– More experience with editing audio to a more precise level
– How to operate the radio studio desk
THIS SHOW HAS BEEN AIRED.
So how did it go?
Overall the show went really well. There was one mistake on mine/presenters part where the presenter spoke over the end of a pre-recorded package. However that was only because the editing of the audio wasn’t the best. Most of the feedback revolved around the pre-recorded audio. Some of it was too long (Lincoln City Radio interview and Calum from Gravity radio interview), then other bits of the audio could of been edited down to get rid of some of the long pauses, pauses and breathes etc.
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Wednesday 22nd January 2014 – Lend Me Your Ears
Writing Radio Drama
How did it go?
For this show I was the producer. As a group we had a disadvantage from the very start. The way the terms worked out it meant that as a group we only had one week of preparation, where all the group were in Lincoln. Secondly we also had a group member drop out from the very start. This meant that Molly had to double up on jobs and do multi-platform and present.
As a producer I think the end product was pretty good considering the unfortunate circumstances. I wanted to make an impact with this particular show, a show that stands out to the other past LMYE shows. So I decided we would do a LIVE radio drama. This had never been done with lend me your ears before, and talking to the siren staff, it had never been done on that station before either. I always like a challenge.
The week before the show we started brainstorming ideas and coming up with some decent, solid ideas that we could move forward with quickly. However when I brought up the idea of the drama, everyone was on board. Live guests was the real issue considering the short amount of time we had to organise the show.
I contacted various Lincoln lecturers and radio practitioners around the Lincoln area, but was getting a fair few rejections. Eventually we got a few yes’s, much to our relief. One problem with having this little time to organise the show was finding the time to edit the pre-recorded clips in time for the show. We went along to ‘Script This’, a local script reading event for young, upcoming script writers a chance to give their scripts to semi-professional actors to be read out. This was held on Tuesday, the day before our show. This meant that the BA had only 12 hours to edit the clips, to a high standard, in time for the show the next day. Finding time for rehearsals was also tricky, the BA Kate, had only two 2 hour rehearsals to learn the desk. This was made harder by the fact that we managed to get a live phone call interview with a post graduate student that had gone onto to make a company making children’s learning pod-casts.
Overall Am I pleased?
I have to say yes. I was ambitious from the very start. Even if we had more time it was ambitious so considering the time re-strains it might have seemed a little crazy to go forward with my initial ideas. But it worked out and I’m glad I went for it and didn’t back out because I was too scared.
The live drama was the most stressful bit of the show. But it turned out to be the best. Even the siren staff commented on how well it went! It sounded clean and professional which is exactly what I wanted. With the live interview we managed to get some really professional answers that I feel made the show a lot more interesting. The live interview, however challenging it was to pull off, I felt was the weakest part of the show. We didn’t manage to ask the right questions to get some decent answers, and the guest didn’t really feel like it fitted with the theme of the show. One positive from the phone interview was that we managed to get a snippet from the guests company. It split up the show and kept it fast paced. Plus it gave a plat form for the audience to know about other exciting businesses.