Weekly Diary

This week we met and finalised our idea. Despite our original idea being based around making a documentary type programme on speech therapy, this was expanded to be a three-part series of podcasts, with each of them focusing on a different sense with none of them having importance over each, leading to the name senses.  Yet because of the time limit we have and issues around getting enough people to talk to us, we focused on three senses these being, speech, blindness and deafness.Each episode will run for around 20 minutes.

This week I started to research different organisations around Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire and started to put contact details in the grid Molly had created

This week we discussed again what our ideas were and how we were going to implement them , alongside creative ways in which we could go about doing this, such as in the blindness having someone who is blind describing what they can see. I also had a meeting with rose to discuss the learning objectives that i would need to discuss and how I would get a client for the project, from this i started to talk to hospital radio stations locally and charity groups by offering them the podcast.

Me and Molly also discussed a strategy in getting people to interview with me focusing on Nottinghamshire and Molly on Lincolnshire.

This week we continued to contact the groups in and around Lincoln. I received two responses from the previous weeks emails and replied on these and Molly got 2. Molly got in touch with the Lincoln and Lindsey Blind Society in Louth, where she has organised an interview for next week.  I also confirmed my learning objectives with rose, alongside pursuing a client at all costs but with a certain doubt in my mind that i would succeed after receiving no replies and decided that it may be worth looking at putting the project on Siren Radio.

This week we continued to contact the groups in and around Lincoln. I received two responses from the previous weeks emails and replied on these and Molly got 2. Molly got in touch with the Lincoln and Lindsey Blind Society in Louth, where she has organised an interview for next week.  I also confirmed my learning objectives with rose, alongside pursuing a client at all costs but with a certain doubt in my mind that i would succeed after receiving no replies and decided that it may be worth looking at putting the project on Siren Radio.

This week started with us interviewing the Lincoln and Lindsey blind society which Molly arranged.  Despite being unsure what to expect from the interview it was very good, as there were 5 members of the society who gave us insight into what they do, what its like to work with blind people and being a young blind adult. We also went and visited the Lincolnshire Children’s Deaf Society in Birchwood, despite their being children both me and Molly felt a bit uneasy interviewing children so we only talked to the parents.

In the meeting with Rose we talk about we still hadn’t got very far with the Deafness episode and she was able to give us some people to contact, of which Molly and Simon are getting in contact with. We again talked about ‘creative content’ this meaning the supporting material that is made to go with the podcasts such as videos and how we can be creative with the programmes themselves. 

This week  Molly had booked an interview with a blind woman, however, due to a mixup on where it was supposed to take place, it was rearranged for another day. In the meeting with Rose, I discussed the chat with Ryan the assistant editor of Siren FM that I had earlier that week about putting the podcasts out as a one-off hour-long programme. This lead to an agreement that they would be aired and all that was needed was a date to be set.

This week after our meeting with Rose, Molly and Chole went to ask about talking to someone about the guide dogs that where on campus on Friday. Unfortunately this never ended up leading to anything and as result, we were quite panicked about getting someone to talk about guide dogs. We then went to the students union to discuss if we could get a mass email sent out asking for blind/deaf students to get in touch with us.  As well as this Molly got in touch with Social Paws, of which they are visiting on Monday and a partially sighted student on campus who we are talking to on Friday

Molly then recorded Vox Pops around campus and in town, asking:

If you had to lose one of your senses, what would it be and why? – we found the majority of students would rather lose their speech.  In terms of the goal I set myself this week it was to work towards getting content for our sight episode and continue with the others.

https://thelincolnite.co.uk/2018/03/labradorable-guide-dogs-help-lincoln-students-de-stress/

On Monday we visited Hykeham to meet Di from Social Paws, one of the founders of a local guide dog group. We went to her house and met her guide dog Bridie, who we’d met on Wednesday. I thought the interview went quite well apart from not knowing what to expect, or knowing if Di was sighted or blind.

On Friday I interviewed Ben Cheney, a partially sighted student at the University of Lincoln. He was really easy to talk to and we found out that there was not a lot a large amount of support for him at uni. I found that this interview was the best one I had conducted so far because he was very easy to talk to.

Unfortunately our meeting with the therapists was cancelled due to the snow, however we are rearrranging this for after easter.

My goal this week was to write the script for blindness.

This week we focused on editing the script for the Blind Podcast Episode, which me and Molly did for a two day period. Later on in the week we then recorded the narration for this episode of the podcast.

I then edited the interviews down into useable chunks following the script, placed my narration and then started to do a rough edit of the episode, without music.

My goal this week was to finish the sight episode.

On Monday I interviewed Megan, a partially deaf student at the University of Lincoln. This went well apart from me being a tad flustered when I was interviewing Megan and I couldn’t recover. However the content was useable.

The next day I interviewed Michelle a sppech therapist based in Lincoln, this interview was good fun and was quite interesting for me being that I had experienced therapy myself.

This week we had received Rose’s feedback on the sight episode so I worked through this and made the changes. Rose also suggested that we use nosie reduction software to remove clicks and whispers that were present in certain interviews and she then showed us how to do this.  On the 19^th of April we met with George Tipler, an audiologist at AllHear in Lincoln, our final interview for the project.  Following on from this we then sat down to begin writing the script for sound once this was finished I then recorded the narration and Chloe started to create a rough edit that we would put music in later.

The goals this week were to get better at using noise reduction software and finish the entire project!