How Sound effects and Music built our Recording

As I have said in my previous posts, Sound Effects, Music and other Micro Elements are all needed to build up a radio recording, As we saved our recording after each session as we went along it was easy for me to go back and cut some clips out of what we have done and take a look at the importance of combining Micro Elements together when creating a recording. 

CLIP ONE: Beginning of Scene One, Lt. Justice has just pulled into the crime scene and is narrating his surroundings. 

This clip was taken from when we first imported our recording into Soundtrack Pro, If you listen to the clip you can see that it is hard to imagine what is going on in the story and where exactly the character is, even though Lt. Justice is explaining where he is there is still no background noise to aid the listener into imagining the scene. 

This clip was taken from half way through our editing stage, we had almost finished editing scene one. We decided to add the sound of cars going by as Lt. Justice had just pulled off the road into an alley way, we liked using this particular sound effect as it has a doppler effect where the cars seem to go from one side to the other, this is good as it sounds like the cars are traveling past our character. 

This clip was taken towards the end of our editing, we were almost finished but decided to go through to see if there were any parts we could improve on, we decided we could make this scene sound better by possibly adding more effects. We looked through the archive on Soundtrack Pro and found a sound effect of a Helicopter flying over. We added this over the top of our recording to make the city sound busier, we did have to turn the levels of each sound effect down so it sounded like background noise and just just an effect slapped over the top of our voices! 

CLIP TWO - Scene Three, The Sconer and Abi are discussing what they are going to do as they are about to be rumbled by the police. They are in La Boosh Bar having a drink amongst other people. 


This clip was taken from when we first imported our recording into Soundtrack Pro, If you listen to this clip it would be absolutely impossible to tell that the two characters are sitting in a bar as both of them do not even say anything about where they are. 

We decided to add some general background talking over our recording to try and make a bar style ambience to give a clue about where our characters are, however we decided this would still not be enough to help our listener imagine where our characters were. We also had to adjust the levels of the sound effects as it was hard to hear our main dialogue. 

The final effect we added was a piece of music we found from the college sound library, this worked perfectly and it now sounded like the characters were in a public place with lots of people, the general talking in the background was clearly recorded in an indoor environment as there is no other background noises such as wind. The music complimented the background noise as it suggests they are in a place to socialize. We choose Jazz music so it would fit in with the name of our bar that appeared in the script and made the venue sound a little classier. 

CLIP THREE - Scene Two, Lt. Justice is in his office narrating his thoughts on the crime case he is working on, He becomes tired and decides to open the window to get some fresh air. 

This clip was taken from when we first imported our recording into Soundtrack Pro, You can tell that Lt. Justice is in an office environment as he mentions sitting at a desk and looking through some paperwork, however he says in the recording "I opened the window to let in some air." We decided that it would be a good idea to include some kind of effect to show that a window is being opened. 

We added a "Window Opening" sound effect on the clip to show that as he was narrating what he was doing he was moving to open the window at the same time, however this would not be enough, we needed some kind of street noise to go along with the opening of the window. 

Lt. Justice says "The sounds of the busy nightlife flooded through the window." We found some street noise and sampled it without the window to see if it would go well, we adjusted the levels so the effect increased in volume whilst the window was being opened. 

This was the final clip from this scene, We agreed that the two sound clips worked well together so put them together to make the clip work. 

The end of the clip has some high levels of sound which seem to clash with each other, so after this stage we went into the level editor and adjusted each channel so they all sounded right. 

Evaluation: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Apart from our main product we had two other ancillary texts to complete, these were an advert that would appear in a Newspaper and a Double page radio listing spread with a feature for our recording. These were created to support our radio drama recording.

Newspaper advert:

Before I started creating my newspaper advert I drew some rough sketches of what I wanted it to look like, I scanned the photos in and put them onto my blog. I then decided to take some photos for my poster which I would edit later in Adobe Photoshop, this would be used as the background for my poster. I then put my photo into Adobe Photoshop and edited it, once it was edited I began to work on the poster it's self. 

The advert would be an effective piece to have as it advertises my drama when it is broadcast on air, without advertising my listener count would be low as nobody would have heard of the product, having an advert in a newspaper would be a good idea as millions of people read printed newspapers everyday. 

Double page spread:

Once my poster was complete I began work on my double page spread radio guide, this supported the poster in terms of advertising as a feature in a radio guide can be used to advertise my product further and give more information into what the show is going to be about. It also targets a specific audience as people who read a radio listings guide are clearly going to be interested in what there is to listen to on the radio. 

These to pieces combined with my final recording are a great start into getting the show on air and ensuring that the show will have listeners. 

Evaluation: Audience Feedback

To get a collection of feedback for our final radio drama piece we hosted a radio listening party for an around 40 students from Northampton college, many of which we didn't know, The students were aged between 17-19 therefore only a small number of the audience would have just fitted into our target audience. Although this idea was still good as it gave us a chance to receive some ideas about what we should improve and what was good about our performance.

Most of the feedback we received after the broadcast was good and almost everyone enjoyed the clip. The points that were raised for improvement was the ending, as some listeners became confused wether or not our recording had finished or not. Another point that was raised was the way the story was told, many listeners became confused with the narrative and sometimes did not understand what was happening in the story, In my opinion the story was pretty straight forward and easy to follow however I am a Film-Noir movie fan so understand how the style of a film noir story is set out, I think that if the we received feedback from people with an older age range that point would not arise as they would understand the stories narrative. 

Even though I have a different opinion to some of the points that have arisen I would still have to listen to the views of my potential audience and work on them to make the broadcast more enjoyable and easier to understand.  The things I would change in the recording would be the ending, which would need a little tidying up and finally drawn to a close with some sort of audial end credits. I would also try and improve the narrative to help my audience understand what is going and finally I would spend a little more time working on our accents to ensure we don't change them slightly or fall out of them throughout the broadcast. 

There was also a great deal of positive feedback collected in, Listeners particularly liked the use and placement of sound effects and music, many also enjoyed the story line and the way it was set out. I agree with the responses I was given and am very happy with the final recording of Transgression.

Evaluation: Media Technologies and the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation of our Project

Research and Planning of our Project:

When Researching and Planning my project the main Media Technology I decided to use was the internet, I used a lot of different research pages to find out about the History of radio and radio drama, some websites such as wikipedia.com were very helpful when looking up the history of radio. I also used the listen online tool on the BBC Radio website to listen to a number of different shows and broadcasts to get an idea of what a Radio Drama episode looks like. I also used my Facebook account to ask friends what genre of radio drama we should decide to create, this was a good idea as it was almost a way of conducting primary research as people could comment on my post with there suggestions! Another found another useful website that had an archive of clips from radio history that are well know and famous, I hosted these to my own file host and made a flash MP3 player for my blog, now my audio files can be played on the blog! 

When planning my Poster and Radio listings I used a scanner to scan my hand drawn images onto the computer to post onto my blog, this was a quick and easy process as it scanned my photo's and saved them as a .jpeg file straight away. 

Construction of our Project:

Hardware - 

When recording our radio drama we used a selection of different tools to record our voices, The college has a Sound room where we could record our work using there soundboard and microphones, These were all connected to an Imac which had a piece of software installed that was listening and recording our voice and surroundings. We also used a Digital Camera when creating our first poster design and I used a DSLR camera to capture the image for my final poster. 

Software -

We used a huge amount of different softwares when constructing our Recording, to begin with we used the Mac OSX Leopard operating system for all of our work. Within that we mainly used Soundtrack Pro to edit and modify our recording, we also used a piece of software called Audio Hijack Pro which was used to record sound that was being played on the computers Line-In, We used this to record sound out of the Safari web browser to use on our work. When creating our posters I used Iphoto to import my photo's from the camera and sent them straight to Adobe Photoshop for editing, My whole poster was constructed in Adobe Photoshop however my double page radio listing was designed in Adobe InDesign as it is a tool design for creating publications. I also used the Safari web browser to access blogspot.com to write this blog out, sometimes I used Microsoft Word to type out my blog posts when I was unable to connect to the internet, I also made my first post via e-mail, Blogspot offers a service where you can write an e-mail and send it directly to your blog as a post.

I also used a website called mydatanest.com which is a file host, I used this to host my .MP3 files on my blog, which included my sound clips and final radio recording, I also created a flash MP3 player to play some famous clips from radio history. 

Evaluation of our Project:

When evaluating my work I used the Advanced HTML text editor that is provided with your Blogspot account to type up my posts, at some point I had to upload some sound clips so I used a website called mydatanest.com which is a File host to host my .MP3 files, once they were uploaded onto my host I used a piece of HTML code that would help Blogspot understand that I wanted an MP3 file to be played on my blog. 

Evaluation: In what ways does my media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My media product uses many different conventions of real media products such as a theme tune, sound effects, music, speech and style of story line, there have been many other radio drama broadcast set in the style of Film Noir such as High Sierra which was broadcast in april 1947, other radio drama broadcasts that are set in a Film Noir style include Gaslight, The Big Clock, Criss Cross and Shadow of A Doubt. All of these radio drama programs use the same or similar conventions as the ones we have used when creating our final piece. 

We have challenged real media product conventions by keeping the actors who's voices appear in our recording a secret and not revealing them at the start or end of our radio drama production. This  originally happened as we lost the final audio clips of our broadcast however towards the end of our time we decided it might be a good idea to keep them secret to play with the "Who Done It" concepts of the actual story.

Evaluation: Representation of Social Groups

The characters in our radio drama are very stereotypical when looking at Film Noir films and recordings. The main character "Chief Justice" is a stereotypical american detective that is hell bent on catching a particular criminal. He also has a deep voice and seems to have a carefree attitude when solving crimes. 

Our female in the broadcast "Abi" was described through narration to get what sort of character she was to our listeners. We described her as being very attractive and seductive however she is also powerful and is capable of doing anything that a male is capable of doing including extreme things like carrying out a murder. 

Evaluation: My Audience and My Media Institutions

I think the audience that would be listening to our radio drama would be between twenty-one and thirty-nine. We understood that our radio drama would not be played before 9PM as there is bad language and our story-line touches on controversial topics, therefore it would have to be played after the watershed. I also think that males would be more interested in our broadcast because it has manly themes such as blood, gore and murder. However I still think there would be a female audience as there are many Film-Noir movie fans in the world and I believe that they would also be interested. 

I think that stations such as BBC Radio 4 would play our recording however I think our drama would be more suited on BBC Radio 3 Drama as it plays experimental dramas rather then classic style drama broadcasts. BBC Radio 3 also play the show "The Wire" which aims to push the boundaries of drama and narrative, I think our recording would work well on this show. 

I also believe that my drama could work well if it was released as a weekly podcast or online stream, this way people can download the episode so they don't miss anything and can also share the episodes with friends to get them listening to the story too, that way we would gain more listeners and our ratings would increase.