Day: April 26, 2018

I have chosen to benchmark the first episode of senses, not because it is the strongest, but because I feel that it is to compare with the benchmark.  I will be using the BBC Radio 1 programme I hear Voices: Donna.

The Radio 1 programme starts similarly to senses with music being utilised as an opening, however in our episode, I have talked directly on top of the music, with me saying ‘Senses’ and explaining the episode before continuing to explain the premise of that episode, almost identically to what has been done in the Donna episode where the narrator is introduced and then explains her story.  While the Radio 1 programme continues to go on with the narrator (Alice), Senses has already broken off into its first interview, showing the difference of styles as there are no interviews in the R1 programme. This shows the first difference in treatment, as senses is a combination of a podcast mixed with a documentary meaning that we have narration and interviews rather than just one single voice. Whereas in I hear voices there is just one voice as it is told through Alice’s own words.  This could lead to people saying that it is more emotional and to that I would agree as this episode of senses is me telling my story but also involving others, whereas R1 is just Alice.  In regards to the music that is used, we utilised similar genres with the slight difference being that we used a wider variety such as electronic and classical, whereas R1 used just one piano track.  If you listen carefully there is a jump in how Alice sounds at 02:04 where it sounds like she is being interviewed rather than narrating, we also applied this technique as I was interviewed by Chloe and we then cut the questions out to make a concise dialogue.   Regarding overall levels, I feel that both are similar as they are in essence the same product and our piece doesn’t distort etc.

To fulfil my multiplatform aim we went about this differently to how I had done previously most notably through us using a website rather than social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram etc.  This means that everything i ins one place, be this extended interviews or supporting content such as Youtube Videos.  If we were fully professional ourselves it would act as a good way to market our services tying in towards my other learning objective of being professional.

The use of video content was also crucial as it offers the listener a more in-depth experience of someones disability, for example the video for sight is one mimicking the level of Bens vision to truly shock the viewer. The other role was to allow everyone to be engaged so those who are deaf would be unable to naturally engage seeing as this is a podcast, to counter this we made subtitle videos for each episode.

The link for the site is as follows:

https://sensespodcast.weebly.com/

This post will discuss how we went through the editing process to make it as smooth as possible and make sure that time wasn’t wasted in the process.

First of all we would conduct the interview with either a zoom or a phone in one case, the audio would then be placed onto one of our laptops and put onto the google drive that we had.

The next step was for one of us to then transcribe the interview so that we could copy text out of it into the finalised script document. This was a method i learnt from my time at a production company in London and I felt that it sped the process up.

Following on from this we would then write the script either on our own or as a group and then would make relevant changes.

After a finalised script had been agreed I would then record the narration in a varying amount of takes.

Following on from this I would then do a rough edit of everything, meaning that the interviews were in the right place, the levels were okay and music cues were put in, but were still to be agreed.  If needed I would also delete parts of the interviews that I didn’t feel worked.

Finally, we all sat and listened to epsiode and agreed where music needed to be changed or levels needed to be adjusted.

In terms of supporting content, this was done after, with the subtitles being put on to the final version of the episode and the experience videos being made at the same time by Molly.