Monday, February 9, 2009

Plan 18/20
Prod 46/60
Eval 16/20
Total 80/100
Grade A

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
I feel that my radio presenter introduction is very similar that of other radio jingle’s introducing a presenter. I had a beginning in which I had to draw the audiences attention of what was to come, a short part for music, then talking and a guest. This therefore accomplishes all the goals set in this task whilst keeping a smooth yet fast flowing jingle which catchy. The music differs slightly and this transition is not very noticeable as the music genres do not clash which was a challenge and needed a lot of experimenting to perfect. No silence is left whatsoever which is nearly always the case in radio shows unless it is for a particular purpose.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?
As my music genre was rap and freestyle, this type of music is most appealing to the younger generation ranging from around 12-30 years of age. There is a very large amount of people that are interested in which the male gender is the more dominant of the two. Techno sounds are used at the start however this is used mainly to capture attention but may draw in some of the techno listeners which is for ever increasing it possible listeners to the show. The guitar may also interest another audience, and you will find that these types of instrument and music often over lap and people like all three.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
I would defiantly distribute it to radio channels such as ‘Radio 1’ as the music featured and the genres used are extremely popular in the modern world of music and will be featuring the new up comers for this business.

Who would be the audience for your media product?
As it is modern freestyle raps and the up coming stars of the rapping world I would target my audience at people aged from 12-30 roughly and many males as I know from experience that many females are not interested in this music and the males seem to be more fascinated by it. The socio-economic class does not have much of an effect of the audience as people of any class can like any music, however I would possibly lean more to the C2DE class.

How did you attract/address your audience?
I attracted the audience through the loud electronic radio sounds used at the very beginning then fading into a modern day electric guitar. The audience was addressed by myself with a sound effect editing my voice for added interest. I then dismissed myself by introducing my new guest. He then exchanges a few lines of dialogue before beginning his freestyle rap.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
I have learn a lot about this type of technology and the methods used for making radio shows. The software that I used I found very simple and straightforward with many more complex options to help ensure a better outcome. Many ways of improving the quality can be used, I have touched on one of them which was ensuring that the volume bar does not reach red, others are to use a microphone for the recording and making sure that there are not too many tacks at a time, with all tracks at a single time not clashing the beats or the genre. I have also seen that this is a very quick process to do and you are hard to go wrong with it. Having musical knowledge will help with this project but I have seen that it is not essential and a good outcome can still be achieved without it.

Making My Radio Jingle From The Start continued...

It is essential that all of the volumes are at the right level to get a good quality sound in which emphysis is put on a number of tracks at certain times. For example the talking (radio presenting) has to be louder than the bed track. If the volume is tii high on a certain track the sound may become fuzzy and distorted therefore decreasing its quality. This can be seen by this icon



When ever the red part is seen on the bar above it means that it is too loud, orange is acceptable and green is good. I have ensured that on all of my tracks the volume never reaches the red. To do this i have had to lower the volume on many of the other tracks which led to a successful outcome.




To add a new track which is not an intstrument i used the toolbar below in which I dragged and drop whatever i wanted and then re-arranged it to the correct position.



However for the voice clips I used a handheld voice recoreder which has a better recording quality than that of on the computers. I cut the voice clip into sections and then inserted them into the position that I wanted. This was where no loud and earcatching music was playing so that the voice of the presenter was heard clearly, a bed track was used to make sure that there was no silence at the time of the talking. I fould that the voice clip was however still boring and plain so I decided to put an effect on it so that it was a little more interesting. To do this I used the bar on the right hand side of the image below. The 'i' button shows the toolbar if it disapears.



By clicking on the 'vocals' button a large selection of effects are shown, these change the vocal effect, to find my prefered one i simply tried them all out to see which one i thought was the best.


Once I thought that I was finished I pulled over some people who had not yet heard it and got there opinion. The crisism was very constructive and I used there notes to change my jingle around slightly. The main problem was to do with volumes being to high or low in certain places.


This is what the majority of the project looked like at the finished satge just before exporting the clip. As you can see the two orange bars are my voice presenting the show and what is going to occur in at the start of it. These two orange bars only have 3 other tracks at the same time at the most, in which these tracks are often fading out or fading in. The electric piano draws attention to the show just before the talking starts so that everybody hears who's show it is and then what is happening in it. Afterwards I had to export the soundclip from a garage band file into a MP3 file. This binds all of the Instruments and tracks into a singular file which is a much smaller size than that of the garage band one.

Making My Radio Jingle from the Start

I used a programme galled ‘Garage Band’. The decision for my choice of software was this because it is very easy to use and enables a more complex level of editing as well as its simplicity. This software is readily available on the Macs. So firstly I needed to open up a new project by clicking on the programme, this menu then popped up, you click the ‘Create New Music Project’ and then save the file as a suitable name in an easily accessible location.





After you have saved this file you may begin working on Garage Band. I chose to first put a base track which was a beat so that i could work around it an see what goes with it, as it is a freestyle the beat is one of the most important parts of my jingle and is also used as a bed track where silence would be taking place. The beat however did not sound like there was enought to it so i added another beat which had the same timing to give a fuller and much prefered sound. These two pictures show the beat timing and how they are both in sync.

The lines going vertically up and down on this picture show the time of the beat. These lines need to be similar to the other beat that I used, however they may be two beats of the other sound track to one beat of this one, as long as the the beats are not off time with each other the mixture of tracks should work which in my case they did.

After the base and beats are put in place i decided to experiment with an instrument which i was going to use in my jingle. I decided on a modern guitar, this was a very short clip just to draw the audience in and the sound produced was very aesthetically pleasing. Howecer I had hit my first obstacle whcih was that this opening part did not draw enough attention to the show, as a result I moved these parts forwards a few seconds by highlighting them all and dragging them, in the free gap I added some techno radio sounds which would definatly capure the audiences attenetion. These then fade out into the sound track with the guitar and beats, this is seen in the picture below.

As you can see in this image the volume track is shown to be decreasing as it moves towards the right hand side. This is also when the guitar track comes in. The blue ball on the middle left is the object used in which the volume of the track can be changed. This volume track becomes visible when the 'T' butten is pressed.