Evaluation.

1. Evaluation. By Kloë Reese Whelan 8274

2. In what ways does your media product use or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? We researched into the codes and conventions of radio media by listening to a variety of different radio shows aimed at many different audiences and although they were all different, all radio shows we listened to used the same basic conventions. For example news beds and jingles. The conventions of radio are what an audience are used to and although we wanted to portray individuality we though it would be dangerous to differ too much away from the norms and conventions of radio, as our audience would thus become Confused. We used the main conventions of radio such as news beds, vox pops and outside broadcasts and tried to keep them as professional and realistic as possible as we felt that this is a convention that should not be varied on. We kept out news content up to date and professional sounding as well we kept our outside broadcast as professional sounding as possible. However we did feel that some conventions of radio felt clichéd, for example, the majority of our research concluded that a jingle should be cheesy. But we felt this was too much of a cliché and decided to make our jingle more modern sounding and decided that it would appeal to our target audience.

3. How does your media products represent particular social groups? • Because our media product is radio, there is a limited amount of representation of particular social groups. Our news content was unbiased as possible as we selected relevant international, national and local news that occurred at the time, therefore we were uninvolved in how we choose what news to present. We also sourced our news of non-politically biased websites such as sky news; however, because our target audience is the late teen market, we did choose news that co-inside with our target audience’s interests, such as gossip news.

4. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? • As our radio is a local radio production we felt the more traditionally method of an analogue aerial was unnecessary for distributing our radio production, as we feel there is no need to reach a global audience. However if we did eventually feel a need for a global audience, we could achieve this with the much more cost efficient and practical internet.

5. Who would be the audience for your media product? • Our local demographic is teenagers that live the “par-tay” lifestyle that we broadcast. Our target audience’s main interests are music, and attending and hosting parties. Our news articles are selected from current news at the time of broadcast, but we choose the most relevant news that appeals to our target audiences interests for example, gossip and music news. Our target audience’s location is limited by our “local” radio but we feel that we appeal to the majority of teenagers and young adults therefore a large distribution area is unnecessary.

6. How did you attract/address your audience? • We sent out an audience survey to a selection of our target audience within our chosen region. We then correlated the responses and made decisions from these result. We found that the main interests of our target audience was attending parties and listen to music whilst socializing. We decided after much research, that our radio jingle should include our station name, slogan and station number and that it should attract our target audience by not being “cheesy”. Also we decided that our news beds and motifs should sounds as professional as possible and that we should stick to the main codes and conventions that we researched so as not to confuse our audience. We decided on a regional accent to present our shows as this was the majority answer from the survey audience and that it would appeal more to our area demographic. For our news content we again made a decision from our audience survey and decided that a selection of international, national and local news along with sport and whether would have a varied content and appeal to the largest demographic of people.

7. What have you learn about technologies from the process of constructing this product? • We learnt how to construct surveys and analyse data results using www.surveymonkey.com. For further research we analyses other radio stations by streaming from the internet, a skill which helped us progress from the preliminary exercise to the full project. • We gained knowledge into blogging as we blogged all of our progress on an online blog www.edublogs.org. We also became adapt at retrieving sound sources of the internet by locating and downloading royalty free sound sources that we deemed suitable for our station for our preliminary exercise using www.freeplaymusic.com and we used www.thefreesoundproject.com to download our news beds and motifs. As well as our sound sources, we used premier pro to sequence and mix our jingles and beds and then we used ‘Zara radio automatic software’ to record our preliminary exercise and our final live news broadcast. • We’ve gained knowledge into the use of media hardware used in the industry like microphones, pop shields, and a dead cat for our outside broadcast. We also used a mixing desk for cueing tracks and sound levels. We had a number of difficulties becoming used to the new software’s and skills, but we swiftly overcame these and these skills eventually helped in our final broadcast.

8. Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full project? The preliminary task enabled us to develop new skills that we could then enforce on our main project. We learn how to use professional studio microphones and learnt the value of vocal technique which helped us greatly in improving our main project. In our preliminary exercise we had to research the area and write our own script as well as improvise this again helped the progression from preliminary exercise to the full project by enabling us to develop our improvisation skills and research and filter information into our own script. From our preliminary exercise we also learnt how to adjust and amend our jingles using the premier pro software.